The Cross and the Star : The Post-Nietzschean Christian and Jewish Thought of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig [1 ed.] 9781443811378, 9781443810111

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The Cross and the Star

The Cross and the Star: The Post-Nietzschean Christian and Jewish Thought of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig

Edited by

Wayne Cristaudo and Frances Huessy

The Cross and the Star: The Post-Nietzschean Christian and Jewish Thought of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig, Edited by Wayne Cristaudo and Frances Huessy This book first published 2009 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2009 by Wayne Cristaudo and Frances Huessy and contributors Cover Image: “Europa Trauert” (Europe mourns), artist unknown; classic historical postcard from the collection of Cordula Tollmien. Used with permission. Available at http://www.ww1-propaganda-cards.com/images/intro_6.JPG.

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-1011-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1011-1

TO FREYA VON MOLTKE

God is the cross and is David's star. —Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity The history of every person paints his character. I will tell you what my life has been: do you too place a little trust in me; and let us be united even when distance parts us. The world is so waste and empty ... but to know of some one here and there whom we accord with, who is living on with us even in silence, this makes our earthly ball a peopled garden. —Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ........................................................................................................ xi Acknowledgements ................................................................................ xxiii Part I – Rosenstock-Huessy’s Engagements with Nietzsche Chapter One................................................................................................. 3 The End of the World or, When Theology Slept (1941) Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 17 Hölderlin and Nietzsche (1941) Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 21 Nietzsche’s Untimeliness (ca. 1942) Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 27 The Perils of Intellectual Spaces (1956) Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Part II – Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy: The Star and the Cross—Affinities and Differences Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 49 From the Star of Redemption to the Cross of Reality (1959) Georg Müller Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 73 The Discovery of the New Thinking (1987) Wolfgang Ullmann

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Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 105 Franz Rosenzweig’s Letters to Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy, 1917-1922 (1989) Harold M. Stahmer Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 139 The Great Gift—The Impact of Franz Rosenzweig’s Jewishness on Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Wayne Cristaudo Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 163 Orate Thinker Versus Literate Thinker Michael Gormann-Thelen Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 175 Sovereignty and Sacrifice in Writings by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig Gregory Kaplan Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 191 The Stubbornness of the Jews Robert Erlewine Part III – Liturgical Speech and Deed: Church, History, and Education Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 209 Speech Is the Body of the Spirit (1987) Harold M. Stahmer Chapter Thirteen...................................................................................... 225 Grammar on the Cross Peter J. Leithart Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 243 Goethe, the First Father of the Third Age of the Church Matthew del Nevo Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 277 Rosenstock-Huessy’s Anti-transcendent Critique of Karl Barth Wayne Cristaudo

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Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 291 Rosenstock-Huessy and Liturgical Thinking Donald E. Pease Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 307 From Here to Eternity Michael Ermarth Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 333 Education in the Shadow of Camp William James Claire Katz Chapter Nineteen ..................................................................................... 349 Christian, Muslim, Jew (2007) Spengler Notes........................................................................................................ 359 Index........................................................................................................ 409

PREFACE

F

RANZ ROSENZWEIG is hardly a household name in a discussion of the world’s philosophers. Nor is his friend and interlocutor, the social philosophy scholar Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, a household name. Nevertheless, it was their mutual engagement with social thought and with speech-thinking that collectively created both a tension and an illumination in the discourse on language and on Jewish-Christian dialogue. It has not been the fashion of philosophy to mix and match these two men into the garb of generally accepted disciplines in the field. Nevertheless, it cannot have escaped anyone who takes a serious interest in Jewish philosophy that Rosenzweig was enormously important for Emmanuel Levinas and was a close friend of Martin Buber’s, with whom he translated the Old Testament into German. For that matter, if Buber is somewhat out of philosophical fashion today, the same cannot be said of Levinas. His first philosophy of ethics has for many scholars become the essential supplement to Heidegger’s enormous impact on post-World War II social theory. It is no accident that Levinas’s star has started to shine so brightly, following the two public scandals involving Heidegger and Paul de Man, which brought on a crisis confronting French social theory in the late 1980s. In the case of Heidegger it was the publication by Victor Farias of (what in English appeared in 1991 as) Heidegger and Nazism that put on the table again much of what had long since been known about Heidegger’s politics, combined with some new revelations about Heidegger’s personal behavior while he was a National Socialist rector at Freiburg University. In the de Man case, it was the headline of the New York Times on Dec. 1, 1987, “Yale Scholar Wrote for Pro-Nazi Newspaper” that opened the can of ethical worms. The real importance of these two scandals was that they pushed contemporary social theorists to insist upon disclosure of the ethical credentials of their own work. It was, after all, their work that had fused Marxian hostilities to capitalism with the more Nietzschean and nihilistic elements of will to power, and Heidegger’s radical ontology and the moods activating social action. The fact was that whereas Marxist party hacks remained convinced that his thoughts on the materialist account of history could be tailored to form a coherent philosophy, those familiar with Nietzsche and Heidegger did not see any point in remaining in

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Marx’s philosophical jalopy when much better philosophical sports cars were available. Further, the failure of the working classes in World War II to overleap their nationalism required a much more voluntarist style of politics than Marx had allowed for. Thus, through the somewhat unsavory, but commonsensical, prejudice of guilt by association, the political engagement of the 1968 generation could be sharply severed from the political stench surrounding Heidegger and de Man, and the hermeneutical benefits derived from the two be retained. Broadly, the 1968 paradigm was borne in guilt and trauma—the guilt of having Nazi parents (Germany); the guilt of being in Vietnam and the guilt of having turned a blind eye to slavery and the terrible treatment of Native Americans (the United States); and the guilt of the empire’s colonies (Great Britain and France). The black, women’s, and gay movements would become burning issues as well, and a range of theories and discourses, including women’s studies, post-colonialism, and queer theory, would emerge and change not only university culture, but also public culture generally. The political character of the paradigm had nothing specifically to do with Heidegger or de Man, but everything to do with sensitivity to the scope and character of injustice, oppression, persecution, and the fallout and aftermath of the trauma of the Holocaust and World War II. It was in France that the paradigm received its greatest theoretical sophistication, though the Frankfurt School was important in Germany and the United States. Unlike Germany, where irrationalism had been seen as inherent to Nazism (so evident, for example, in Thomas Mann, György Lukács, and Jürgen Habermas), France had seen rationalism as a curse culminating in fascism. (The various interpretations of Nietzsche in both countries would also reflect this divide.) Thus, even in World War I, the French avant-garde reacted to its faith in reason; for far from having saved the world, reason had thrown it into such horror. Given that the one characteristic that seemed to unite the various post-World War II social theories—from the Frankfurt School to deconstructionism, to poststructuralism, to post-modernism—was their opposition to any and every form of fascism; the thought of the enterprise being completely undone by its association with fascism was unthinkable. Levinas was not only an ethicist, but if any man had displayed anti-fascist credentials, it was this Jewish ethicist who also happened to be one of the greatest students and internal critics of Heidegger’s work. And while (as a French officer and under the protection of the Geneva Conventions) he had not spent time in a concentration camp; he had spent it as a French prisoner of war in a German military camp.

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Further, Jacques Derrida had already engaged critically, and respectfully, with Levinas. But his close association with de Man and the centrality of Heidegger in his work left him particularly vulnerable to the charge of nihilism. It is correct to say that no one who read any of Derrida’s writings after the two scandals could accuse Derrida of not being interested in justice or ethics. Cynics might say that Derrida’s reinvention of himself and his deconstruction as an ethicist were shrewd career-saving moves. And so when he announced that justice was undeconstructible in his article for the Cardozo Law Review, “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority” (July-August 1990), he had bade goodbye to any lingering sense of nihilism. A more charitable interpretation would have it that his practices had always been deployed by those with an ethical agenda and who wished to give voice to the marginalized. Derrida would ascribe to Marx the same overwhelming concern for justice— breezily indifferent to the fact that Marx certainly never thought justice was “undeconstructible,” but was always a ruling-class ruse.1 But this only confirmed Derrida’s status as a leading social theorist of the left, at a time when the left was in desperate need of some direction to save it from the end of Soviet communism (made no less difficult by the fact that academic communists had mostly given up long before on the Soviets). But by the 1990s, the times had changed substantially since Michel Foucault had somewhat dumbfounded, if not utterly incensed, Noam Chomsky in a famous debate in 1971 when Foucault, in a perfect rendition of Marx, had ridiculed the concept of justice as a smokescreen of vested interests. What, then, Levinas offered social theorists, who wanted to expose the vestiges of fascism within western institutions and relationships that came after World War II, was the fusion of two things. One was a critique of totality, which was as central to Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectic as to Foucault’s critiques of prisons and asylums and clinics and “the author,” as to Gilles Deleuze’s critique of arboreal logic, as to Derrida’s deconstruction of the hegemonies of writing and totalitarian reading strategies, as to Jean-François Lyotard’s critique of meta-narratives. The other was an ethics that was as decisively non-nihilistic as it was opposed to any status quo that harbored nascent fascist potencies. The critique of totality and the opening-up of the value of the infinite (again, Adorno, Derrida, Deleuze, et al., were also embracing openness) seemed to be the philosophical question of the moment. And it did not take scholars of Jewish studies long to notice that the case against totalism had 1

Marx makes this statement on numerous occasions, including The German Ideology, but perhaps his Critique of the Gotha Programme is the most theoretically developed account of his position on this issue.

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been made by the very man Levinas referred to as the greatest source of inspiration for his Totality and Infinity, Franz Rosenzweig. It is also no accident that the star of Rosenzweig started to rise again around the same time, resulting in a flurry of new books on him. Among them have been (and they are still appearing regularly) numerous essays, articles, and books that compare Levinas and Rosenzweig. To some extent this volume of essays is part of the same wave of social critique briefly traced above. And it is very likely that a reader who comes here will be engaging in the cluster of concerns that has brought Rosenzweig into philosophical prominence today. Since Rosenzweig has found a growing philosophical audience outside, it is not surprising that his friend and teacher, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, is also beginning to find some new readers. Certainly one cannot read a page of Rosenzweig’s intellectual biography without coming upon the role of Rosenstock-Huessy in leading him to a radical new understanding of the meaning of faith in the modern world. Usually, though, Rosenstock-Huessy is quickly dismissed as the incidental friend / teacher / mentor who wanted to convert Rosenzweig to Christianity but failed. In the past there have been a few obscure essays that have tried to redress this interpretation, usually coming from the flanks of a very small body of scholars who are familiar with the writings of Rosenstock-Huessy. We have included translations of two exceptional essays, by Wolfgang Ullmann and by Georg Müller, in this volume. And I myself am in the process of completing a large work—provisionally titled Religion, Redemption, and Revolution: The Speech Thinking of Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy—which is devoted to showing the common core of concerns that united them, as well as the different areas of endeavor they each dedicated their lives to serving. However, whereas I have long thought that the track that leads from Derrida to Levinas to Rosenzweig would also inevitably lead back to Rosenstock-Huessy, I also think that Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy are driven by concerns that do not neatly fit in with the paradigm of postWorld War II social theory. And if they are read with care in the context of their own problematic, then one sees that their unique and profound power comes in large part from belonging to a very different paradigm. Indeed, I think it is a paradigm that has been passed over, or at best overlooked, because of the massive trauma inflicted by fascism and the multiplicity of problems generated by what we may broadly call “fascist forces.” But the greatest weakness of the 1968 paradigm was not what its conservative critics have always said—viz., that it is essentially nihilistic and in danger of slipping into fascism. It is true that the left has, along with every other

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group, had its fair share of moments of madness and was often compromised by falling silent and being hesitant in criticizing true, existing communism. Nevertheless, from the Dadaists and surrealists, France had always had a substantial left that had been anti-totalitarian, even if some of their most distinguished members (Louis Aragon, and Paul Éluard, for example) kept falling into the maw of Stalinism. I think the real danger of the 1968 paradigm is that its focus on fascism means that it does not see dangers that do not fit that kind of form. Another way of saying this is that it operates under a “logic” in which oppression and skewed power relations provide the gates through which fascism can and does march. But the world is full of evils that do not make their entrance through these portals. Now Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig were major contributors to a paradigm that Rosenzweig termed the new thinking and whose other participants included Rudolf and Hans Ehrenberg, Viktor von Weizsäcker, Martin Buber, and Florens Rang. The basics of this paradigm assume the centrality of speech, time, history, and faith. This book is, to some extent, an induction to that paradigm. However, I do not want to suggest that all contributors read Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig the same way, or that all have grappled with them for the same amount of time. The point I wish to emphasize here, though, is that the new thinking was formed on the eve of, and during World War I, by German thinkers. It was formed before the emergence of fascism, and its relationship to rationalism was different from that of France. Coming from Germany it also had less historical hatred toward the Church and, concomitantly, again in general, its Christian voices were less “Medieval and / or reactionary.”2 It was formed largely, as Rosenstock-Huessy suggests in his explanatory essay accompanying the publication of the 1916 correspondence on Judaism and Christianity between him and Rosenzweig, as a reaction to the failures of humanism, a failure all too evident to them in World War I itself. Rosenzweig’s “remaining” (as he called it) a Jew, by really participating in and continuing to create the world through his Jewish faith and not the liberal secular orientation that so many Jews of his class and time had adopted, was as important to the paradigm as were the conversions of Rosenstock-Huessy and the Ehrenbergs from Judaism to Christianity. Rosenzweig would die before the Nazis came to power in Germany, 2

In general I think Rosenstock-Huessy’s Out of Revolution and Die europäischen Revolutionen provide a remarkable vantage point for detecting the different national “biographies” of several Western European nations in the context of the revolutions that formed their respective national characters.

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while Rosenstock-Huessy, who left Germany immediately on Hitler’s ascension, always thought of World War II as the continuation of World War 1. He was far more attuned to the passions of love and hatred that drive people to the kinds of idolatry exhibited by fascism than by a more structural, quasi-Marxist analysis of social conditions of the sort that one finds in the Frankfurt School, for example, which would become so important for the development of the politicization of literary studies and the evolution of cultural studies. A telling difference between the two paradigms, and one that for me alerts us to the strength of one and to the weakness of the other, is the way in which incalculability is fundamental to the paradigm of new thinking, while it is almost ignored in the social theory of the post-World-War-II / 1968 paradigm. Given the emphasis on marginality, on hidden visibilities, on arboreal logics and the like in the 1968 paradigm, this might seem a strange claim of mine. And I concede there is a desperate hope for a notyet, not-known, in the various post-thinking that has also led to another reversal of Marx—viz., the revision of utopia as a good term. Yet I think the proof is in both the focus of attention and the kind of solidarity favored by the paradigm. The focus is on observable power hierarchies—race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexual difference and, more recently, religious difference being the most commonly cited. This focus basically looks at power as something one group has more or less of. It is not unlike Marx’s view of the capitalist economy as a kind of zero-sum game. Further, it seeks to resolve these problems through political action. It is true that the tremendous artistic and creative explosion, particularly in popular music and film, was cultural rather than political, and hence should not be contained, constrained by, or confused with the 1968 paradigm I am talking about. But therein largely lies the difference—the 1968 paradigm valorized politics, the artists of the 1960s generation was more interested in simply expressing and creating, and only secondarily in giving it political expression. (The parents were as confused and equally tormented by both.) Now I do not want to say that the 1968 paradigm is worthless or that it does not deal with important issues, or simply, again as conservatives tend to imply, everything was fine if only we had just left well enough alone. The world might not have been greatly improved, but thanks to the 1968 paradigm, racism, homophobia, and masculine brutality—when brought out into the light—can no longer dress themselves up in any kind of excuse or pseudo-dignity. But what I want to point out is that the newthinking paradigm is different because it is more interested in invisible power and in new, unanticipated and redeemed forms of life.

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The Christian and Jewish faiths are perfect examples of this, and it is not surprising that the new thinking both gravitates around these faiths and revives them by reintroducing us to ways that often are archaic, very orthodox even, but almost unknown and unrecognizable by people who take the commonplace (mis)representation of them as their essence. Both religions emerged unexpectedly, as God creates the world—out of “nothing.” And here is nothing predictable at all about their respective power or even about the kind of power that each has. Jews have been enslaved and threatened with extinction time and time again—until the establishment of the state of Israel, they had been stateless—and for Rosenzweig being stateless was part of their very being And that, as well as not being bonded primarily through the other great mark of identity—a common language—is what, with their faith and endurance, Rosenzweig’s thought makes the Jews a “remnant.” Christianity, on the other hand, became the most powerful religion in Europe. But originally it was a mad belief among the riff-raff in the most miserable posts in the Empire. And the paradox goes further. How was it possible that from such powerlessness and idiocy that such empires and intellects and artists and geniuses emerged? What Roman equivalent of our contemporary academics would ever have thought that Rome’s grandeur would be lost, and a thousand years later Jesus would be alive, hailed, in far greater a territory than Rome had ever been, as King of Kings, including by people so uneducated that they could not even name a Roman emperor? But then there is another issue that is every bit as important as Christianity’s emergence into visible power. For whenever Christianity has been most powerful, its essence has been most imperiled. And it has reinvented itself in the most unexpected and contradictory of ways. Those who think the Church is wherever the sign of the cross is visible neither understand God nor (the d)evil. For the one loves constantly and unexpectedly, and does not conform to signs; and the other deploys our slovenly and blind conformity to signs to do the opposite of what the holiest of signifiers pointed to only yesterday. Just as the Church was rotting from the corrosion of its splendor, when St. Francis rejuvenated it by embracing lepers and poverty, so did Rosenstock-Huessy see the Jacobins, with their fighting to emancipate the Jews, as the real Christians in France. In sum, the new thinking takes faith, hope, and love as far more important than present power structures. For it thinks as much of future calling as of past emitting, and of present powers as but a play within these intersections, even when they are murderous. Or, to take another example: The rehabilitation of Carl Schmitt has been a fascinating one. Schmitt who, at the last minute (Rosenstock-

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Huessy sees him as the modern German Talleyrand), threw his lot in with the Nazis, had become by the late 1980s an important new addition to the 1968 paradigm. Again, not that the paradigm was becoming more fascist, but its line of vision was definitely compatible with Schmitt’s emphasis on spatiality or territoriality (the very term makes one immediately think of Deleuzean politics). However, the new thinking does not think in terms of spatial primacy, but of temporality. It is interested in the act of founding and endowment (Stiftung), incarnation, and eons. Even the way Rosenstock-Huessy casts the problem—the same problem we all face today, of living rich lives at peace in our differences, which is also a key problem of the 1968 paradigm—suggests a different approach. For him the problem of difference is not cast primarily in terms of cultures or groups per se—again a spatialization of the issue, whose grave danger is to essentialize and to romanticize behaviors that actually support the fascism the paradigm wants to uproot. Instead the problem of difference is cast in terms of distemporaries and contemporaries. Time-thinking is interested in and patient enough to sow seeds; it eschews the immediate peace as much as it does the immediate crisis and the immediate power structures. It sees veneration of a visible power as idolatrous and thus as suicidal. And it sees love’s seeds as the real source of future potency. Having more wealth, power, fairness, opportunity, and so on, may not be a bad thing, but it does not stop sin; it does not stop the corrosions and toxicities of the human heart. The invisibility of the heart can never be understood, and its inspiring and expiring nature can never be cultivated by seeking to replace the tiniest acts of loving grace with the more abstract and general solutions and laws. One only has to consider the damage of litigious cultures, of family law courts, of the prison system in countries where the rule of law is triumphant, to see that the rule of law is no end in itself, any more than redressing unequal power relations will guarantee communities. In sum I am suggesting that the way of looking at power in terms of fascisms or better distribution fails to open us up to the invisible and the incalculable; they are neither grace nor love. And I think it no accident that love and theology have been receiving more social theoretical attention in more recent years. The relatively recent addition of theology to the 1968 paradigm (something always in Levinas) is indicative of the pushes of reality and the need to readjust thinking to come to grips with circumstance and a move in this direction. But there is one other stumbling block in the paradigm. And that is the stumbling block of “purity.” Bear in mind that Rosenstock-Huessy wrote a work called I Am an Impure Thinker; the very title is indicative of

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a key aspect of the new thinking that is especially pertinent to this thought, and which alerts us to a gulf between the 1968 paradigm and the new thinking. For the 1968 paradigm is really, in the terms of Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy, still fundamentally a pagan paradigm. For purification is a pagan strategy for dealing with the tumult of the dangerous energies of the world (it is Plato’s response to the dying Greek city-states, the Stoic response to Rome’s cruelty, the educated North American response to American imperialism). Thus, if the current paradigm is successful we will not be racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Islamic, and so on. Surely, though, that is not a bad thing. No; put thus, it isn’t. But it will be no more effective than Plato was, or than Marcus Aurelius was in cultivating a genuine peaceful future. If we are not more loving, we will definitely find something else to be, and we will be that something else before we even know we are it, because we will not be attuned to what is growing up in our hearts, focused as we are on eliminating certain impurities and shaming those who exhibit them. That we defile, that we err, that we injure, that we get it wrong, that we are weak, that we do not see, that we mess up, that our plans go astray, that life is uncontrollable, that we fester, that we get lost, that we are imperfect, that we lack energy, that we go mad, that we stumble, and so on—and let us simply say that we sin—does not mean we should not try to be better. Yes, let us have some place for Plato and Kant and Levinas, and for ethics and morals. But we are the material of any future kingdom, and a hermeneutics of suspicion tells us nothing about cultivation of that material. The new thinking is concerned with cultivation, and it starts with us always being impure—we will always defecate and have to deal with that. Let me follow up on the idea of our being sinners, or weak and broken in need of God’s love. To return briefly to the point: the new-thinking paradigm came out of World War I to contrast it with the purer one of 1968, and something pertinent for understanding its character. World War I, unlike World War II (at least seemingly so) has no simple source. All of Europe was to blame, and all of its history led it into war. I should also mention in passing, on this point, that Rosenzweig did not at all welcome the new democratic Germany dawning at the end of World War I, because he rightly sensed it would be swarming with anti-Semitic elements that threatened Germany’s future. But a more straightforward understanding would recognize that the popular-power good and the aristocratic-power bad would have been too busy celebrating the overthrow of an illegitimate power to grasp really how much the forces of future destruction were swelling, as Rosenzweig had. Thinking of where contemporary social theory is today, I am

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reminded of Rosenzweig’s central critique of Hegel that runs through his two-volume work on Hegel und der Staat, that Hegel had tried to understand the political problems of the age via an oscillation between Rousseauan atomism of the will and Montesquieu’s institutional complex of social layers. The problem was that, in being focused thus, he omitted all sorts of other forces in motion—most notably, nationalism and empire. Which is to say, he overlooked the dominant problems of nineteenthcentury politics. It is very noteworthy that Hegel’s twentieth-century renaissance as a political philosopher was in the fallout of fascism and against the background of the Cold War, where there was a preoccupation with questions revolving around the state or collective and the individual. It is equally noteworthy that for theorists like Foucault and Deleuze, Hegel was hate-worthy because he was seen as the very embodiment of a way of thinking that would suffocate all difference. The Hegel renaissance and the kind of criticisms directed at Hegel by French neo-Hegelian critique are very telling, indeed. They show where post-World War II intellectual attention was (and for so many, still is) and how the problem of peoples driven by different ends, by different faiths was left largely unnoticed. To his credit Foucault saw that the Iranian revolution was a moment of great importance. But his reportage of the event was so based in Sorelian fantasies of myth and social energy that his analysis is a source of constant embarrassment to his acolytes—as it undoubtedly was to him, himself, a few years later. More recently, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have certainly taken on board the anti-imperialist sentiments of Islamism. But their entire analysis rests on a fantasy of creating allies with peoples who do not share any of their philosophical commitments. Their trust in Western (neo-Hegelian) philosophical hegemony is unshakeable. The study of Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy is timely—more timely than merely making Rosenzweig a supplement to Levinas. For the timely issue of the day is, once again, not individuals versus totalities. This was a thought raised by Rosenzweig, but not in a way that is analogous to the left-wing Hegelian break with totality, showing a real arc (as Rosenstock-Huessy once noted) from the young Marx and Ludwig Feuerbach to the various neo-Marxist, neo-Kantian, and neo-Nietzschean ideas that so strongly run through much of the twentieth century. Rather, the issue is one of traditional faiths and the way nations are shaped by those faiths. Samuel Huntington was alert to the change in geo-politics when he spoke of a clash of civilizations. However, his designation of a civilization (as well as the nomenclature itself) was something of a distraction from the real issue of what Rosenstock-Huessy had far more convincingly depicted as the major political problem of the next century.

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That is, Rosenstock-Huessy identified the clash and reconciliation, already alluded to above, between different bodies of time and, to repeat the above point of making contemporaries of distemporaries, of creating a “metanomic society.” To the extent that he had emphasized the necessity of establishing concord without requiring the homogenization of unrelinquishable differences, his idea of metanomics has a degree of affinity with the political solution to what had, indeed, held together so much post-World War II social theory. That is, the dedication to a politics of the valorization of difference. But, as we have already also suggested, an all-important point dividing Rosenstock-Huessy from the post-structuralists, post-modernists, and others, was the weight Rosenstock-Huessy placed upon time. For the most part, post-structuralist thinking remained utterly oblivious to issues of faith-based social life, where negotiation cannot be broken down into the variables of social identities—gender, race, and ethnicity—and class that dominated their own discursive regimes. Irrespective of one’s take on the various issues that have been woven around these four social variables, the dominant resolutions do not travel easily into peoples whose soulscapes have not been formed by faith in the powers of freedom and equality. And it must be added that in spite of the great noise made about how different post-modernists, which by the 1990s had started to become the favored label for the various 1968 Parisian-based social philosophies, were from modernist ideologies, freedom and equality are as much the two puppet-masters of post-modernism as of modernism. What divides postmodernists from modernists is the issue of where and how freedom and equality can be realized—not whether these are the most venerable of social norms. But freedom and equality (and sexual equality between the West and Islam is a major issue of difficult difference) are not held in such esteem by all peoples, particularly those whose historical trajectories have only recently been made to adapt to the global commercial and human rights-based normative international order. I have also mentioned that Rosenstock-Huessy, if known at all today outside Germany, is known mainly through his association with Franz Rosenzweig. There have been a handful of works on him in his own right, but mostly in German. By and large scholars interested in Franz Rosenzweig have found Rosenstock-Huessy to be unworthy of study. But things are changing. When I started writing on the two of them some four years ago—about fifteen years after I started reading RosenstockHuessy—I would never have guessed that I would be asked to attend two conferences in the same month (one in Frankfurt, and one at Dartmouth College, in 2008) devoted to the two men. This volume was the result of

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one of those conferences. (The other conference has produced another volume, which will be published in Germany.) What struck me about many of the papers in both conferences was that a generation of younger scholars is turning to their thought. I was also struck by the fact at Dartmouth there were older scholars writing about Rosenstock-Huessy for the first time, and were unencumbered by his unfashionableness, or unorthodoxy, or (completely undeserving) reputation as a fanatical Christian proselytizer, and were simply dealing with the issues as they see them. WAYNE CRISTAUDO

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T

sprang from a conference with the allencompassing title, “Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen RosenstockHuessy: Dimensions of a Relationship,” held at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA, in July 2008. The conference was sponsored by the Jewish Studies Program, the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding, the Fannie and Alan Leslie Center for the Humanities, the Department of Philosophy, and the William Jewett Tucker Foundation at Dartmouth; and above all, by the Eugen RosenstockHuessy Fund. In particular, we gratefully acknowledge the innovative approaches, hard work, and rewarding outcomes for which that event’s organizers—Susannah Heschel, the Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth; and Norman Fiering, President of the Eugen RosenstockHuessy Fund and Librarian Emeritus of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University—were responsible. Seven of the papers from that conference are included in this volume. Taken together, the titles of these conference papers speak to Rosenzweig’s and Rosenstock-Huessy’s interlocutory tension in their thought, theology, language, speech, and the legacies of education: HE IDEA FOR THIS BOOK

“Rosenstock-Huessy and Liturgical Thinking” (Donald Pease); “Grammar on the Cross” (Peter Leithart); “Sovereignty and Sacrifice in Writings by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig” (Gregory Kaplan); “The Stubbornness of the Jews: Resources and Limitations of the JewishChristian Dialogue of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig” (Robert Erlewine); “From Here to Eternity: The Philosophy of History of Eugen RosenstockHuessy as Eschatology on the Transmodern Installment Plan” (Michael Ermarth); “Orate Thinker Versus. Literate Thinker: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Versus Franz Rosenzweig—A Difference that Makes a Difference” (Michael Gormann-Thelen); and

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“In the Shadow of Camp William James: Philosophy, Practice, and the Politics of Education” (Claire Katz).

We are very grateful to the authors for their willingness to further the conversation, with insight and engagement, on these two great dialogical thinkers. The work of the other authors in this volume is also deeply appreciated. Not only are they adding to the vitality of the discussion around Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy, but they also widen and deepen the appeal of these two thinkers across times and spaces. That is, this book contains: Significant new contributions from Australia (Matthew del Nevo and the translator, Jürgen Lawrenz) and Asia (“Spengler” and the translator, Roland Vogt); Two still-timely contributions from a former Rosenstock-Huessy student, Harold Stahmer, who provided previously published articles on speechthinking and the human and intellectual dimensions of the relationship among Eugen and Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig; and Two posthumous contributions—from Wolfgang Ullmann (theologian and scholar from the German Democratic Republic, a political conscience for the reunified Germany, and an eventual Green Party member in the European Parliament); and from the founding director of the Friedrich von Bodelschwingh-Schule in Bethel, Georg Müller, who was also the founder and first chairman of the Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy-Gesellschaft and founder of its archives in Bethel. Our heartfelt gratitude goes particularly to the heirs we contacted—EstherMarie Ullmann-Goertz and Jakob Ullmann, and Richard MüllerDombois—for their willingness to share the outstanding legacy of their respective parents’ work.

Our thanks also go to: The other members of the Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Fund Board (John Baldwin, Tom Duncanson, Clint Gardner, Raymond Huessy, Giles Jackson, Russell Keep, Wim Leenman, Leon Martel, Freya von Moltke, Helmuth von Moltke, Robert Pollard, and Paula Huessy Stahmer); and The Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Literary Heirs (Paula Huessy Stahmer, Hans G. Huessy, and Mark Huessy) for their support of this publication concept and for their very kind permission to publish the four essays by their grandfather—and in particular, the translation by Jürgen Lawrenz of the chapter on Descartes and Nietzsche from Soziologie I..

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In addition, the editors are immensely grateful for the careful evaluation and suggestions by the Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Fund’s Executive Director, Mark Huessy, on specific matters relating to translations. The verification of text statements, citations, and footnotes throughout this volume could not have been completed without the indispensable resources available from the Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Collected Works on DVD archive and the Guide to the Works of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. The editors gratefully acknowledge the earlier support, particularly of Leo and Cynthia Harris and the Omina Freundeshilfe, of those projects in assuring the development and existence of both critically important additions to the library on Rosenstock-Huessy. And finally, our deep thanks go to the bibliographer Lise van der Molen, whose foundational work in both of those resources profoundly supported the editorial work of this book. —WAYNE CRISTAUDO AND FRANCES HUESSY

Specific additional acknowledgments BY WAYNE CRISTAUDO: I wish to thank Roland Vogt for being the best colleague anyone could have and coming to my rescue by translating the essays of Wolfgang Ullmann and Georg Müller. Special thanks also go to Jürgen Lawrenz for his vibrant translation of the chapter on Descartes and Nietzsche from the Soziologie, and his dedication to rapidly absorbing the thought of someone who has proven for decades to be difficult to translate. I also want to thank my close friend and the best boss in the world, Dixon Wong, who has made life at the University of Hong Kong so fantastic. Mano Mora, my friend and colleague and musical accomplice for letting me interminably bash his ear on this stuff. Jennifer Buckley, Lelani Paras, Wendy Baker— God bless you for your love. As always, I would like to thank Freya von Moltke for her inspiration, support, and openness to any who are interested in scholarship on Rosenstock-Huessy. BY FRANCES HUESSY: In the weeks during which the editing and the interactions with authors, translators, publishers, and heirs occurred—not to mention the late-night phone calls from Wayne in Hong Kong—all the members of my expanded family stood by with great patience and understanding: Mark and our son James Huessy; our two international exchange students this year, Julia Czaplinska and Richard Linstedt—all occupying our house in Vermont; and our daughter Mari, a student in her first year at Grinnell College and

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who returned home for the summer. Thank you so much for adding to the miraculous character of this book. I am also very grateful to each of the living authors whose papers appear in this volume; to Wolfgang Ullmann’s and Georg Müller’s heirs I was able to contact; and to the translators, Jürgen Lawrenz and Roland Vogt. The conversations with each of them, through their papers, permissions, or translations, and through the correspondence attendant to a publication of this kind, were a perfect demonstration of responding although we mutually risked being changed. And finally, I join Wayne in thanking Freya von Moltke, whose unswerving influence and love for so many years have brought the inspiration of both Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy into all of our lives in a way no book, not even this one, could possibly do.

PART I: ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY’S ENGAGEMENTS WITH NIETZSCHE

CHAPTER ONE THE END OF THE WORLD, OR WHEN THEOLOGY SLEPT (1941) EUGEN ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY

Editors’ note. This essay is a selection from a manuscript submitted to Christendom magazine, in response to an article entitled, “Realized Eschatology,” by Frederick S. Grant (Spring 1941 issue). There is no record that this essay was ever published. The draft manuscript as presented here contains minor corrections to spelling, punctuation, and grammar, and conforms to a single, consistent citation style. The original typescript, in two sections, can be found at Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “The End of the World or When Theology Slept,” Collected Works on DVD (Essex, Vt.: Argo Books, 2005).

I

N THE SPRING ISSUE OF CHRISTENDOM, Frederick S. Grant dealt with “realized eschatology” as the basis of the Church. Genuine Christianity realized an end of the world. And Grant pointed out that it took the theologians fifty years, after 1892, to reclaim this completely abandoned “eschatological” position. Before that, for more than a century, the life of Jesus had been the subject of research, along with eschatology, and like the miracles, a point of omission or of embarrassment. Eschatology was a stranger to the frame of reference of progressive Christianity. When it was readmitted to the fundamentals of source Christianity, men like Kirsop Lake in all honesty concluded that thereby Source Christianity was divorced forever from reasonable modern man. For could reasonable man believe in an end of the world? In this way, the specific “historical” enlightenment of the nineteenth century, after inheriting “natural Christianity” without Last Things from eighteenth-century Enlightenment, finally refilled the empty cup of eschatology for the founders of the Church, but only by widening the gulf between these Founders and our modern world, by 1900 years, simultaneously. When I taught at the Harvard Divinity School, I once asked everybody in the room if he believed in a Last Judgment. Everybody laughed; I hope

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I did, too. And ever since, I have been told, there has been jesting about the mooncalf that literally believed in the Nicene Creed. The belief in the Last Things was left to mooncalves and jesters. G. K. Chesterton was allowed to sing the majestic verse in his immortal Ballad of the White Horse: “For the end of the world was long ago.” Who would take such a phrase seriously, as the stark truth of everyday life, among progressive Christians? However, in Europe, this progressive theology is at an end. Before me lies a great document which I received two months ago from a famous historian of the Church, somewhere in Europe. In this letter he simply asked me to read numbers 10, 832, and 1771 in Rouet de Journel, Enchiridion Patristicum, and he added that these were the texts of actual interest to the peoples of Europe. His quotations, Didache 16, 3; Cyril’s Catecheses 15, 11; and Augustine are the most solemn and violent descriptions of the Last Judgment, the Antichrist, and “eschatology realized” before our eyes. This theologian, then, lives at present the truth which F. Grant’s essay presented to the American “professor of the crucifixion” as a fact 1900 years ago. This truth of eschatology realized is not a theologoumenon to be rediscovered scientifically, and put on our desk in the form of a book. It is an event of eternal truth, of our own times to be recognized on, and by faith. Three years ago, I was allowed by the Ecumenic Council of Churches to state this position in an essay, “Heilsgeschichte = History of Salvation versus Theology.” Although Theology now rediscovers the Source Eschatologyof the Church, Christendom at large—and the States in particular—are still living under the anti-eschatological bias of nineteenth-century criticism. The lag between research and laity in any field is considerable; but in the case of eschatology realized, the lag has reached ominous proportions. And the lag is not altogether on the side of the laity. No people can live without eschatology. And while theology slept, the laity betook itself to other sources of Last Things. And how could it be otherwise? Should the whole world wait patiently for 150 years until the theologians might have untied their knot? What can the laity do during the erratic brainstorms of the scholars in the deserts of their hypotheses? The layman cannot live on the latest scientific news. He needs complete faith, hope, love. Hence the overthrow of eschatology by the Enlightenment had tremendous repercussions, especially in Germany, the center of theological studies.

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The Church used to administer two eschatologies, one of the Old, the other of the New Testament. The Old Testament eschatology is ethical. The New Testament gives an eschatological faith. Now, during the times when eschatology lay dead inside the Church, these two eschatologies were taken outside and lived there, the ethics by a mass movement, the faith by one man. The essence of eschatology is its infinity. It has no place among finite things. It asks a complete surrender to something outside the existing order of things. Liberal Christianity denied the existence of such infinite forces. Into the finite bourgeois world, the infinity of social ethics was shouted by Karl Marx and his communist friends. He restated Old Testament Justice in secular terms. The infinite faith, the mad faith of the New Testament, mad in the eyes of contemporary churchmen themselves, was reinstated by the life of Friedrich Nietzsche. The difference between ethics and faith is the same as the difference between Marx and Nietzsche. Ethics can be preached; faith must be lived. And ethics always will have to take second place to faith, for this reason. Marx’s book made an epoch. But Nietzsche became the first philosopher whose existence meant more than his “system” and who therefore exploded the very notion of a system. Marx and Nietzsche kept the flames of eschatology real in a world in which the schools of theology believed in progress, in evolution, and in expansion, outside resurrection, creation, and revelation—that is, outside the only frame of reference within which it makes sense. Now, a Christian can be neither a Marxian nor a Nietzschean. However, he may be led to believe that ethical eschatology was saved by Marx in the market place when the temple allowed the flame to die. And we have among us post-Marxian Christians like the Dean of Canterbury, like Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Karl Barth. They have been saved because they humbled their theological pride before the infinite challenge of communistic ethics, without succumbing to its finite political tenets. It is less recognized in this country that we might have to humble ourselves before the eschatological faith of Nietzsche. I am not, and never have been, a Nietzschean. But Nietzsche is not merely a tonic in an otherwise Christian world. Nietzsche is a central event in the history of Christianity (and to me, there is no other universal history). Hence, the reader may understand why, when George Morgan published his book, What Nietzsche Means, I asked his and Christendom’s permission to state the position of post-Nietzschean Christians. This, then, is not a book review.1

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Post-Nietzschean Christians recognize each other as living in a world completely transformed. The experience of Nietzsche means that we have learned to distinguish forever between the Nomen and the Numen Christianum, between the label Christian Church or Christian World or Christian Spirit, and the powers of the Spirit. We understand why the Nomen Christianum could decline without refuting the promises of the New Testament, lest the Numen Christianum—the powers of faith, love, hope—die. These powers bridge the abysses inside of Man, whom we little men have to represent through the ages. In other words, I believe that the Church is a divine creation and that the Nicene Creed is true; and yet I believe that the Church and the Creed of the future will depend for a new lease on life upon un-demoninational, nameless, and incognito contributions of faith. The inspirations of the Holy Ghost will not remain incarcerated in the walls and partitions of the visible or audible Church. A third form, the listening Church, will have to unburden the older forms of worship by assembling the faithful to live out their hopes in services within unlabeled, un-demoninational groups. In these incognito and un-denominational situations, we shall have to do penance for the generations in which theology slept, in which the nominal churches abandoned the eschatological positions of Christianity.2 By doing so, we may hope to save our places of worship and adoration, and our creeds and hymns, from the powers of this world in times to come. When the churches stripped the “Last Things” of meaning, especially the “end of the world,” Nietzsche saved the meaning and whipped the nominal eschatologists.3 Nietzsche has not abolished Christianity; he has, however, re-invoked the anonymous and incognito life of the Holy Ghost as a power in human society. This turning point of our era was explained one day to Archbishop Söderblom by an old farmer in these terms: There has been the Church of the priests. And it came to an end. Then, there has been the Church of the Levite; it is coming to an end in our days. And we are now entering upon the Church of the good Samaritan.

Nietzsche is the Great Divide between the Levite and Good Samaritan, in the realm of our thinking about God, Man, and World. Just as Abélard invented the term theology, to which we all have been subservient for 800 years, so did Nietzsche demolish this term.4 Friedrich Nietzsche ended the existence of either theologians or philosophers by fusing both into a higher unity. While the theologians slept and the philosophers surrendered to science, Nietzsche annihilated the separation between a pre-Christian, natural reason, and the Christian, supernatural

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faith. For anybody who knows what Nietzsche means, there is no mind which is not a believer and an unbeliever, both; there is nobody whose mind does not contain the Christian experience of a breakdown, instead of a clean slate, as the basis of his thinking processes. Nietzsche has made both the philosopher’s reason and the theologian’s faith into parts of one great mental health, one great innocence of the soul. The so-called philosopher has died away in 1900 years of Christianity. There is no such thing as a purely natural mind or a purely supernatural soul. The mind also is supernatural or the soul natural. And so we had better cancel the whole vocabulary dealing with Man’s Nature. Man is the being that has no nature: Ecce Homo. Man, instead of having a nature, is nailed to the Cross of Reality, being by establishment in conflict with his nature. Man’s reality is greater than nature. Morgan’s book starts therefore with the portrait of the real man and he ends the book again with the portrait of real men. The first part gives the features of the “value-making philosopher” “who lives his experiment,” “writes in blood,” “turns life into flame,” and gives his time a bad conscience. Only when the division between philosophy and theology has been destroyed, when the new thinker singlehandedly “out-believes” his theological confrères by showing more faith than they, when he has proved his Ecce Homo—only then can his philosophy become important. In the light of this horizon, Morgan gives the details of the doctrines on The Will to Power, the Last Man, and Superman, origin and revolution of morals, art and artist.5 All these doctrines are temporal, passing, even fleeting. It is here that Nietzsche’s attacks on Western morality are found, his anti-Christian bias. But Nietzsche himself said that his anti-Christian positions were only for the outside popular opinion. They are marred by too much scientific positivism of the ’80s of the last century—although, in Morgan’s presentation, I was struck with admiration for the certainty of selection and intuition which guided Nietzsche through this darkest tunnel of crudeness. In Morgan’s book, the reader is spared all purely contemporaneous allusions; I mean the allusions to Nietzsche’s own time and country. Morgan, feeling that Nietzsche should become our own contemporary, has succeeded brilliantly in making his book the standard text for our own times. In sifting all purely temporary or German material, the text—and Morgan has evaded the temptation of turning the text into a system—may act as a fresh challenge. Nietzsche always is specific. And he is not casual. And so he affects any specimen of the type whom he has called the “Last Man,” like the stroke of a whip.

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Morgan keeps equally far away from smartness as from blind admiration; he simply states: “Concern with his philosophy is not a matter of philosophical curiosity. It is a necessity of life.” For Nietzsche has our own predicament, to live in a world without roots, “with weak and fastdisintegrating traditions, all broken or about to break.” In our uprootedness we depend on the latest war news, the last fashion in medicine, the stock market, the fastest engine, and then “turning to Nietzsche we gain a new dimension of depth.”6 After the middle part, Nietzsche’s doctrines about a withering civilization and how to put down roots again, Morgan’s text again turns towards the “anthropological” theme of Genesis 1:26; the theme that led to the formulation of the Trinity; “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” The orthodox will wince under this comparison. However, it is a Jesuit father, no less, who says about Nietzsche’s avoidance of the term God: “The word God is so spent that we do not intend to haggle on its behalf with Nietzsche.”7 I do not make my juxtaposition of Genesis 1:26 and Nietzsche lightheartedly. It may turn out that nobody, between 1870 and 1917, has done more to resuscitate God. Nietzsche did it with the one saying: “God is dead.” To say that God was dead seemed the apex of godlessness, to the clergy of our departmentalized religion. They shuddered not because of the accusation against the times, but because of the alleged blasphemy against God. Forgotten was mankind’s source tradition, of the God that died and rose again, and of the God who was killed by his worshipers so that he might be reborn, or of the Crucified who had to be slain that he might raise us all. Like a red thread, this faith of Man in the death and resurrection of God runs through the ages. Before Christ, the Gods were thought to die in the doom or twilight of blind fate, or in a frenzy of tribal ecstasy, like Adonis or Tamuz or Osiris. Finally, in Christendom, in the Crucifixion first, and in the Mass thereafter, and finally in the services of the Word, in Protestantism, God was shown to die from the hands and the unclean lips of his own followers. Man participated in the slaying of the God, and the whole Christian worship of 1,850 years centered around the final and full revelation of this fact that links Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough to the most enlightened Divine Service in a Congregational Church. The 1,850 years centered around this—first bloody and later unbloody— sacrifice of God the Living Son from the hands of the unbelieving minds of natural man. Our faith is based on the fact that all men’s faith is intermittent and that at times, we are without faith. Nietzsche simply acknowledged that the Church, as well as the State of his times, that especially the theology of the life of Jesus, Liberal theology, had forgotten

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this danger. Children are accustomed to calling their Jewish classmates “Christ-killers”; but are they ever told that they themselves, by saying so, kill the God in their hearts? And that the whole meaning of Jesus’s forgiveness was that we all do so at times? It would take a special article to expound on Nietzsche’s act of a world that no longer feared to be forsaken by God. The problems of his insanity, his “anti-Christian” position, could be seen in proper perspective. I here only wished to insist that Nietzsche sees the creation of man as in full process, with the highest reverence for what man should become as the new “lawgiver” and “highest man.”8 And when Nietzsche speaks on this subject, he avoids the mistake of the theologian who simply quotes the Bible, or the philosopher who reasons about man as if the future were not listening in at this very moment to his reasoning process. Being more than theologian or philosopher, Nietzsche in the solitude of his heart yet speaks as the man who should be overcome, to the man of the future who should take his place. He speaks as the last man of the whole infinite past to the first man of an infinite future, and so, speaks with the power that buries and vivifies man, that makes people die and rise again. Real speech makes over humankind. It is, to use a patristic term, the making of man, Anthropourgia. What Nietzsche means never are ideas—then he would be a theologian in disguise, like our modern Platonists; nor facts—then he would be a scientist in disguise as Aristotle. It always is Man, as whom, of whom, to whom he speaks, and all three qualifications are equally essential. Nietzsche, by considering the processes of the spirit to be the heroic act of founding and re-founding society, creates for himself the role of a universal, catholic “medicine man,” in the old tribal sense of this word. But this medicine man now cuts and heals on a level commensurate to the Christian era. Every word that he writes is written in the process of unmaking and remaking man. But we cannot unmake and remake man without believing in a perpetual “end of the world.” Christianity holds that the Word is man’s matrix. That is the reason why we talk not of our mother’s tongue, but of our mother tongue. Language itself is maternal, is our womb of Time through the thousands of years, as the words I am using in this sentence are thousands of years old. Idealism, Materialism, Realism are hopelessly embarrassed by the place of language in man’s creation. They hate it because it makes our mind into a creature. They certainly are not Christian, but Nietzsche is a Logosthinker. Nietzsche is a Christian in two other ways. And I intend to use the rest of this essay to delineate them. First, and most important in the midst of American society, he keeps away from the cheap sociology which

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identifies man with any one of his specific functions in society. It is here that we shall see him provide for the new clergy, the new ministry, the new leaders of the spiritual world. Secondly, he restores to man, in a world all too well known and explored, his realm of freedom for future growth. In both cases, Nietzsche’s existence may be formulated, by the postNietzschean Christian, in terms that go beyond Nietzsche’s own terms, because his existence itself has added meaning for us, and we can act in fellowship again, an advantage denied him. To understand his preparing a new spiritual office we must appraise the old Christian clergy. The original attitude of the Christian clergy put them beyond rich and poor, sick and healthy, grandparents and grandchildren, farmer and banker, soldier and civilian. The clergy were in charge of the delicate point of coincidence between the opposites of poverty and wealth, joy and asceticism, aggressiveness and meekness, health and sickness. During the last century, the ministry has abdicated in favor of the experts. These experts are not kept together by any common “oath of Hippocrates,” by any common faith or ethics. The diseases of society, such as pests, crises, wars, revolutions, have come under the care of independent staffs, none of which acknowledges any other ethics than its own. The ministry has lost its “gyroscopical” significance. No longer does the clergyman tell the patient that sickness is a great event in a positive sense. He himself now calls in the psychoanalyst. He despairs of the idea that poverty might be creative—30 chaplains at a meeting last year agreed that man was the product of his economic circumstances—or that Jesus carried the sword; he thinks that only the generals carry it. The minister rarely dares to correct the professional man in his profession. He leaves him alone in his field because he is told that his own field is a field called religion, and he does not wonder particularly about the strange fact that Departments of Religion are established as Number 47, on campus. In this way the only meaning of the ministry, which is to check all temporary tendencies, has faded; religion is something like the arts and sciences, in the eyes of our educated masses. The professions have grown up into independent clergies. And the professions hold that their worlds last forever. The criterion of the professions is their belief in progress, which is a correct view for any specialized activity of man, but which is in contradiction to our Christian faith about the whole of man and society. When religion was departmentalized, this representation of the whole ended. Some man had to jump into the chasm as the Good Samaritan, as the incognito bearer of our faith in a period living merely on science,

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Nietzsche tried to re-establish the creative center beyond these clergies, beyond these sovereign groups. In this center, the fixed mind of society, the temporal horizon of a nation, could be broken down and die and be reborn, and in this way the new staffs would not run amok as they now do. Since the staffs seem to be innumerable—we have some 250 sciences and their respective professional experts today—the first move to prepare for any new mental regeneration must be to attain some understanding of the functions of these staffs. If we can reduce their numbers to an understandable and necessary minimum of indispensable professional attitudes, we will be much nearer to the central point at which Nietzsche himself made his stand. And, more clearly than Nietzsche himself, we may reduce these staffs to four actually sovereign mentalities, as follows: 1. the economists (with their annexes of sociology, psychology, etc.); 2. the military group, generals, strategists, admirals, and their superbrain of “general staffs”; 3. the scientists, doctors, eugenicists, hygiene men; 4. the political perfectionists of all descriptions.

Popularly speaking, they are the staffs for: 1. wealth-making; 2. strength-making; 3. health-making; 4. change-making.

All four groups are indispensable to any society. That these sovereign clergies are real, any American can verify by remembering how this country has worshiped science and medicine, how it bowed to the economists, fell into the hands of political “-isms,” and is in the hands of the generals today. The wheel of fortune has one day proclaimed the latest vitamin doctrine; the next day, the living on the installment plan; after that, some revolutionary panacea. And today the building of bomber planes seems to solve most of our problems— psychiatric, economic, political—besides the boom for the army and the navy. A wheel might have been the symbol of our lives for the last forty years because we surrendered to economists, doctors, generals, and the Huey Longs, alternatingly. Nietzsche rediscovered that man should protect his independence better. He should stand beyond these four sovereignties. It is the merit of the Jesuit mentioned before to have pointed out that

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Nietzsche has enlarged our understanding of the Cross. The Cross ceases to be a particularly Christian symbol when we can see that Christianity only uncovered the truth of the Cross as man’s form of life.9 If and when the economists, generals, doctors can be put in their place, on this cross, there at least is a first beginning for healing the absolute confusion of tongues that reigns among us. Actually a profound order and complete chart of our social cosmos exists, putting us in the center of a cross of existence. The four staffs divide our time and space in a perfect order. It is easy to see that perfectionists try to plunge us into the future, head over heels, novarum rerum cupidi, as the Romans called the reformers of all sorts. And it is equally plain that our fighters, our armies, are headed toward the external space of the world outside us. It is less familiar to think of the physicians and scientists as dealing with the created world as it has come down from the past, that doctors try to stave off the decay of already-created beings and embodiments. Also, it sometimes is difficult to remain conscious of economics as an art, which makes sense only within a given society, as an inner organization, a division of labor inside an operating unity which economists take for granted. Hence, the most important step is to recognize the front of medicine and of economics. The sciences of the physical life always face toward a world already in existence, face backward to the causes and origins of this world of the past. Such a world always is mortal, doomed, going to die from entropy or from decay. Doctors should not dream of abolishing death; they may postpone decay.10 The race will not be made eternal, undying, by doctors. The future is not under the powers of science, but of service. Hence, the question must be asked: How do we get people who will sacrifice for the future? No studies of the already-existing world, as it comes to us from the past, make sense when there are no people who are pulled forward by our destiny and who are willing to prepare the future. A purely scientific nation as we try to be today would have no future, because all people would be busy dealing with facts; as one of my colleagues told me: “After all, we deal with facts, not with meaning.” The group which is impressed by the needs of the future must be considered as a second group that should check the scientists’ group and that must bring the pressure from the future to bear on the times. Real time, then, we discover, is a delicate balance between future and past, and the result of their conflict we call present. Our time we live suspended between future and past, and there is no such thing as a present that “precedes” the future or causes the future. Nietzsche and any Christian know that the future logically precedes the present. If God should not be who he should be, the presence of God would make no sense whatsoever.

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13

And everybody can verify that when people consider God as having been our “maker” in the past only, and abandon “eschatology” and a belief in God’s Future, their belief in God’s presence disappears, too. Our real time situation is under pressure from two sides: end, as well as beginning. And the same is true of our place in space. Here too the idea of a three-dimensional space is quite misleading. External space has three dimensions. But first of all, space always must be conceived as divided into an external and an inner space, facing inward and outward. A purely outside space without its inner corollary is a contradiction in terms, as a body without a mind and vice versa. Space is ambivalent, always presupposing the twofold unfolding of space into an inward and an outward tendency. The whole space concept of science is coping with onehalf of experienced “space” only. And man, just as much as he creates his present “now” under the pressures from the future and the past, from ends and from causes, also creates his “here,” his horizon in space from striking the balance between his inward and his outward trends. His place is where he “draws” the line, this line possibly being his skin, his clothes, his house’s walls, his profession’s boundaries; in any case, he must live in two spaces, as any living organism must. Inside, economists may be of service; and outside, our tanks and bombers may help. But where to draw the line never is the business of the businessmen or the soldier. It always must be the people who create outer and inner front. The people of the heroic age found the city, draw a new line and create a new horizon, and it is to the spirit of the founders that the business man and the soldier must bow, before they can give service. This is the whole idea behind the clerus, the inspired laos, the people of God. Under the domination of mere experts, our powers to create a society decay. Nobody knows how to draw the line, or where and when to draw it. In my college, next fall, 900 boys intend to take Economics 1. They believe that this course will take them to the center of reality inside our little world. It does nothing of the kind. It operates, on the basis of an inherited horizon, on the inner front of a world kept open for trade by the British Navy. It is no “Great Economy’s” [place] to teach how, eventually, to re-found the city with the energies of the inner front (fellowship, collaboration, integration). The experts whom we have on the inner front do not reproduce our horizon. They can only exploit a given inner group life; they rely on the founding fathers to reproduce it. And this is true for all other three fronts of life and society. The sovereignty of the experts is of a purely expanding character. They take for granted the horizons and decision over what shall be past or future, inner or outer, and they use up these highest values of the race, in their specialized actions.

14

Chapter One

In this cross of professional ambitions, which serve the desires for health, change, strength, wealth, Nietzsche recognized the Witches’ Sabbath of our times. He saw that man had to recoil from any one of these ambitions to save his soul. We must wish to be healthy, yet illness is a blessing. We are for peace, “and yet, when we speak, they are for war.” And so Nietzsche proceeded to call “great” the health, strength, wealth which would contain their opposites: sickness, weakness, poverty, too. We can live the Great Economy of all those forces when we see through them as conditioned by their opposites. The term Great Economy embraces the patristic and the modern meaning both, and it is especially important that the term should be assimilated by American thinking. Morgan has taken pains to give this concept the central place which it has never gotten before.11 “Making Man” and the “Great Economy” are two Christian traits; the third Christian trait in Nietzsche is his practice of the incognito. Man cannot be known beforehand, and he shall not, despite IQ tests, eugenics, etc. To try to know man beforehand meant: to kill Christ, in the old Church; it means to deprive life of its essential conflict; for Nietzsche, we “trans-live” into our opposites all the time. All classifications of man are disastrous; because science classifies, the era of science had to lead to atrocious world war. “A Yankee, a German, a Frenchman,” we say, and go to war. Nationalism and Marxism are based on this diabolical application of science to man. To be called with any one permanent name is an insult to a living human being. The son must become a father; the bride a mother; the conquerors and martyrs must become “more than conquerors” and martyrs, if they shall interest us as human beings. As long as we are alive, we also are undisclosed. “Eschatology” says that the world is at an end, is yesterday, but that you are a beginning, a tomorrow. Eschatology rents and cleaves the identity between you and the world. The world has a fate; you have not. The world dies because it is calculable; you rise if you are incalculable. And against all systematic philosophizing, Nietzsche created the new type of thinker who would think the deepest and profoundest things as he went along, and thereby always be far ahead of his readers and acquaintances, in his inner growth. His incognito, when he died, was nearly complete. He had not seven friends to whom to send his most important book. Millions read him today. Incognito is a condition of growth. Friedrich Nietzsche then is a figure in the history of Christianity not because he hated Christianity, but because he lived it on four levels. He believed in the transformation of man, of the speaker as well as of the man spoken to, by the power of the word.12 He believed in a free people which

The End of the World, or When Theology Slept (1941)

15

need not rush from the wealth-makers to health-makers, to the war-makers to the revolution-makers, because they may accept the privilege of the cross of reality. He pleaded for our incognito in the healing shadow of which we may incarnate the Spirit in un-foretold forms of future life. And he anticipated the end of a world that called man “a product of his environment.” To him, as to G. K. Chesterton, as to Albert Schweitzer, as to Nathan Söderblom, the end of this world was long ago, and we may begin all over again. While theology slept, he realized Genesis 1:26, realized eschatology. Editors’ note. Each of the typed manuscript pages for this essay was numbered and alphabetized, beginning with 15-a. Page 15-a clearly connects to page 15-c, without a 15-b. However, directly after the page from which the final paragraphs above appear, the manuscript begins with a differently typed set of pages, all of which are numbered with 15-b and are ordered further with Roman numerals. The first of these 15-b pages begins mid-sentence and breaks off the discussion about Nietzsche. For this reason, the set of “15-b” pages has been excluded from this essay. Please see Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Collected Works on DVD, for the complete assembly of pages under the title of “The End of the World, or When Theology Slept.”

CHAPTER TWO HÖLDERLIN AND NIETZSCHE (1941) EUGEN ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY

Editors’ note. The following essay was a rough, handwritten manuscript drafted most likely in 1941, and later transcribed verbatim by Rosenstock-Huessy’s bibliographer, Lise van der Molen. The draft manuscript as presented here contains minor corrections to spelling, punctuation, and grammar, and conforms to a single, consistent citation style. Brackets [ ] indicate words or passages about which van der Molen was not certain in his transcription. The original typescript can be found in Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “Hölderlin and Nietzsche,” Collected Works on DVD (Essex, Vt.: Argo Books, 2005).

C

RANE BRINTON, in his book on Nietzsche, distinguishes three possible influences of this work: the Dionysian prophet, the pioneer in a science of man, and the political precursor of Hitler and Mussolini.1 The only thing I can say about this smart classification is that this is not the Nietzsche with whom I have lived and who has pushed me out of my danger of becoming a Crane Brinton myself. I never was impressed by Zarathustra. I have not read it ever from cover to cover. It was too voulu, too well done. The sociological insights, secondly, were interesting, but as Brinton himself says, they are part of a European movement towards a psychology of power and morals, and therefore read critically and, it [on Nietzsche] has to [be] seen to that by his obvious inconsistencies, never could be swallowed wholesale. And the undeniable role of Nietzsche in German politics and the German self-destruction were his early part, the part to which his sister Elisabeth had access, and which she could usurp for herself and the clique first, the Nazi-gang later. It was clear to me that Nietzsche here paid the penalty of his solitude, his remaining single, without son, disciple, or mistress. Such a man can only live the first half of his life forward. At 45 we are overtaken by our ancestors if we have not created children. Elisabeth took over, built the Archive and her legend, simply because in no other way was there any physical, earthly bond left between the Nietzsche in the flesh and the bodily world of his days. This recession into

18

Chapter Two

the womb from which man emerges, is notable where life finds no outlet forward by self-forgetful love. Nietzsche had himself prophesied this interlude. He knew that the Witches’ Sabbath of European nihilism was to follow in the wake of his anticipation. Explicitly did he say so, and claim that the dawn of the new day to which his soul belonged would follow the wars and destruction and anarchy into which his sister’s Nietzsche was lugged, for the purely chronological reasons that the sister lived from 1890 to Hitler. Nietzsche’s attacks on Christianity too obviously came from complete ignorance. I thought them silly. In all these, then—singer, scientist, atheist, prophet—I was never interested, or even repelled! I lived with few utterances of the writer. The aphorism, “Lieben heisst jemand(em) eine Scham ersparen” has helped me greatly.2 The verse Dass Dein Glück uns nicht bedrücke 3 seemed to me profoundly apt to express his own fate. Zu tief ist mir der Wolken Sitz Ich warte auf den nächsten Blitz4

described my generation’s certainty of the preliminary or provisional state of affairs in Europe at a time when the older generation gloried in the fin de siècle, futuramas of which Grover Whalen’s World’s Fair in 1939 was a thoroughly antiquated repetition.5 Such shows we saw in 1905 already with the mischievousness of boys who were no part of that game any longer. What then made Nietzsche so important if his writings were not even read? His life. In the heart of the German University tradition in the classics, a man had achieved success and abandoned it. The one universal ambition of any German, to become a professor, he had reached and transcended. I was young; I was 23 when I joined a university staff; I produced what seemed to me a magnum opus at 26. Obviously, this did not settle everything, then; perhaps it settled nothing. Here was, at the beginning of Bismarck’s Reich, a bifurcation, a protest, a shrill ending. My own teacher was the very man who had snubbed Nietzsche insultingly then, Wilamowitz-Moellendorf. Wilamowitz had attacked Nietzsche in 1872 with his infamous Die Zukunftsphilologie!6 I knew that Wilamowitz also used to attack Jakob Burckhardt and Erwin Rohde. My friend Rosenzweig, much later in his immortal essay on translations, pilloried Wilamowitz for this as the man who had accomplished the task of mistaking the greatest thinker Nietzsche, the greatest historian, Burckhardt, the greatest philologist of his time, for his inferiors.7 I saw Wilamowitz in all his splendor. I liked him. I shall never forget his

Hölderlin and Nietzsche (1941)

19

victorious and attractive mien, the blue ribbon of the order pour le mérite dazzling over the stiff white shirt, the elegant fur coat wide open, stepping out, after having listened to his Pindar. We approved of Wilamowitz as of today. And we believed in Nietzsche, as a signpost erected long before today into a tomorrow without Wilamowitzes. An unseen new trail had been beaten by Nietzsche around the times which surrounded me, free from any requirements of institutions, but imperative for our real life in the future. Never have I doubted, never have I shaken off my belief, that in Nietzsche something final had happened, an avatar of the divine ended. He had stepped outside his time. His sentence (St. Moritz)—Zwar ich leide, zwar ich leide—was innumerable times on my lips.8 This was unshakable, as it is to this day. Because of Nietzsche’s detouring the time from 1889 to the zenith of Wilamowitz (and Gilbert Murray and B. Wheeler) for my soul, and cautioning me to expect another climate, another eon, his madness became as much a part of his life as his previous stages. We now have the good term underground for an existence in suspense. That Nietzsche had, after Ecce Homo, every reason to lose his mind, but that by living another eleven years his soul was still making demands on the living, seemed very rational. Hölderlin’s madness, as well as his Diotima’s death—they occurred simultaneously—to me always made sense. Hölderlin was “insane” for 41 years. But we would not know of him had his body not outlasted his harp’s melodies this long time. Norbert Hellingrath, who in this respect was the faithful mouthpiece of my generation, and was killed in World War I, as were all the best of my generation, has tenderly tried to express our faith in the meaning of such “madness.” If we, as I do, think of human lives as arcs which interlace, Hölderlin, the eternal adolescent, could not die as an adolescent. That would never have proved that he could not later have become as virile as Schiller, as wizardlike as Jean Paul. No, since Hölderlin was destined to embody one certain form of the divine in the form of the adolescent, in the German Realm of spirits, his spirit had cause to vanish when the last shred of adolescence had been torn from him. His body [it]self lived the normal life of seventy years. His spirit was unable to inspire or to fill the later bodies of his life. And the perfection, the unbelievable perfection of this one phase he himself felt as blocking the path to later avatars. Einmal habe ich gelebt wie Götter und mehr bedarf’s nicht9

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Chapter Two

His whole poetry for the ten singing—that is, inspired—years of his life took this risk deliberately: to be this decade so completely, as nobody had since Alcibiades or Plato, to be it in excess, and then to comply with Hades and the dark demons of the netherworld. I challenge anybody who has been able to admire Hölderlin. as he deserves to be admired, if the price paid really is too high. The miseries of all the illegitimate children of Goethe, the debts of Balzac, the starvation of Mrs. Blake—the obfuscation of Hölderlin’s spirit to me seems a nobler, more genuine price paid for a unique tone on the harp of human song. The common denominator which linked Hölderlin and Nietzsche in my heart and mind was their fate, their madness. But Nietzsche did not succumb for the same reason. To Hölderlin, who found Goethe and Schiller in the government of the German Olympus, so to speak, it fell to be forever their Ganymede, their younger adolescent. But Nietzsche raced in 15 years, one-half a generation, [skating] the whole gamut of literary utterance, from footnote to a Greek text, to [the] contemporary criticism, to philosophy, to poetry, to a new legislation of man, to prophecy, to selfrevelation. He exhausted, that is, the forms of human speech. This has never been sufficiently reasoned out; since the days of the fathers of the Church, the inventory of human styles of speech never has been taken seriously. Goethe has said once or twice a deep word about a source alphabet of forces in our soul beyond which we cannot go. Long before I knew of this old tradition of the four Rivers of Paradise, and long before I tested the possible styles myself in my Angewandte Seelenkunde, long, that is, before my reasoning analysis could prove it, Nietzsche revealed the fact to me that he had touched on and exhausted the keyboards on which our soul may speak.10 His madness sat in, when on every one of these keyboards he had masterfully played and not found a response. What do the people think Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead? Something quite concrete: Inspiration, spirit was confined to the individual, spoke, and nobody listened or answered. Meine Seele ein Saitenspiel sang sich selber ihr Lied; Hört ihr jemand zu.11 That Nietzsche truly spoke with power, nobody sensitive to speech at all could doubt. He did not speak like Brinton or any other maker of books, from his mind. His soul, his genitals, his bowels, his heart, are on Nietzsche’s lips. If this shocks the hypocrites, let them condemn all truth. The salesman, the soft-spoken joiner certainly lets the skull produce his words. Who cares for any of his stock phrases? But where are the stock phrases first created, when they are not yet stock phrases?

CHAPTER THREE NIETZSCHE’S UNTIMELINESS (CA. 1942) EUGEN ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY

Editors’ note. The following essay was originally a handwritten manuscript, without a title, drafted most likely in 1941 or 1942, and transcribed in 1988 by Rosenstock-Huessy’s bibliographer, Lise van der Molen. This reproduction of the transcript contains minimal corrections to the rough-draft spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Like “Hölderlin and Nietzsche,” this essay appears to have been a first draft. Mr. van der Molen provided the title, “Nietzsche’s Untimeliness.” In the transcript, Mr. van der Molen also notes that this essay is related to Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s “Friedrich Nietzsche’s Function in the Church and the Crisis of Theology and Philosophy,” a lecture series prepared for the joint meeting of the American Association of Church History and the American Historical Association, December 1942. The original transcript of this essay can be found in Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “Nietzsche’s Untimeliness,” Collected Works on DVD (Essex, Vt.: Argo Books, 2005).

T

HE MAN WHO EXPOSTULATED,

against an era of natural science based on space, man’s power to live in more than one time, had, first of all, to live in more than one time, himself. Friedrich Nietzsche lived deliberately in three periods: He was the decadent of Protestantism; he was the companion of the catastrophe of nihilism which, in the forms of wars and destruction, would follow his decadence. And he was the anticipated legislator of the dawn after the explosion: Incipit Zarathustra. Nietzsche proclaimed man as “the being in transition.” Professor emeritus of his own time, fool-poet-exile of the anarchical period to follow, legislator of the future, he himself lived in—at least—three periods, affirming them all, and yet not coinciding with any one of them. That man belongs to more than one time, makes him divine. “Dionysos,” or “the crucified God,” was the divinity which the man of three eons claimed. Just as in the tragedy of Athens, and as in the solemn dances of all the tribes in which masks were worn that transposed the dances from the

22

Chapter Three

present into the mythical past or the eternal recurrence of animal nature, Nietzsche wore many masks. When a man wears masks, “torn-to-pieceshood”—as William James called it—results. Nietzsche’s horrid features resulted from his use of masks. A mask was in the center of his own tragedy. In 1864, when he was 25, he met Cosima, Liszt’s daughter, a woman his age. She had left her husband, von Bülow, and her children and lived with Richard Wagner. Bülow called her Ariadne, and accused Wagner of having stolen Ariadne from him. Bülow, as Theseus, with the divine insolence of Dionysos, spoke to Nietzsche of this, at a visit in Basel, too. Nietzsche fell in love with Ariadne. And he transposed the triangle of Theseus-Ariadne-Dionysos. Dionysos ceased to be Wagner. Nietzsche became the god. Wagner took Bülow’s place as Theseus, the earthly king in possession! For 20 years Ariadne stayed with Nietzsche-Dionysos in his dreams; when he broke down, he confessed his love to Cosima, for the first time unmistakably. Verily, Nietzsche was already mad in 1869. As an ingredient of life, we all contain this maddening element of transposition. Ours are neither as equally important nor as imitative of Nietzsche’s transposition of the three other people’s relationship; but still we seek roles for ourselves, and roles are masks. Nietzsche demonstrated both: the madness and the fruitfulness of masks. He knew it and spoke of his fate often. “Lest I oppress you, I wear the mask of the devil,” he wrote in a famous poem. And Zarathustra he described as the product of a split of his own person into two.1 The part of himself that threw him into a new era became Zarathustra. For people who believe that man is by nature unified, one, or that a person is a given reality, this is sheer nonsense, disgusting. But Nietzsche took man out of the realm of things of this world. Man is all and nothing. The new anthropology has no right to start with any affirmation about man. It cannot say: “Man is....” Nietzsche lived the formidable new basic truth about human nature: It is the nature of man to have no nature. Man begins with an infinity of men, in himself. To become a person means to conquer the innumerable masks of life and to restrict them. Even then, the end-product is not the platitudinous unity of a thing. Even then, man is not homogeneous. Even the conquering man will still have at least a plurality of natures; because man is in transit from where he came to where he goes, and so, three tenses of being must be represented by his person: the past which he shakes off, the future which he creates, and the bridge in between.

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23

The whole start of science with regard to man is wrong, because it treats him as timeless. But man is times. Nisi esset anima, non esset tempus. The domineering—Aristotelian or Deweyan—psychology naively starts with man’s character as being a unity. They claim that “split personalities,” bundles of nerves, torn-to-pieces-hood, are abnormalities. Nietzsche rejects—like Jesus—this materialistic dogma of man as one thing. Man is incalculable. The science of man has to start with the admission that man, from innumerable divisions, tries to crystallize. The best he can hope for is a three-tense unity. Old (Aristotelian) Psychology the soul divisions man splits “is” schizophrenia one are a priori

Nietzsche’s (and Jesus’) Psychology He aims at unity; he can Man is achieve it by pandemonium carrying his cross of past, future, and present, only

a posteriori

The schools of today see man struggle between: unity as normal

and

being split as abnormal

Nietzsche (and Jesus) see man struggle between pandemonium and triunity.2 The living soul rejects part of herself as past, decaying, and throws herself after some future value.3 This is the way in which a man’s soul is born. And when we give a newborn child its name, we call it into this life of the soul, towards triunity, towards his power to trans-live as a bridge from the past to the future. Jesus is the case in which this triunity stands before us as lived to perfection. Nietzsche makes this one historical case into a scientific and general human fact by showing that it prevails in a life of the greatest imperfection, just the same. Jesus reveals Oneness as triunity: He is the last Jew, the first Christian, and in between the Crucified. Nietzsche relates triunity to pandemonium, remains this side of triunity, between the innumerable masks: The Singular does not occur at all.4

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Chapter Three

We started with the exasperating biographical impotency of his mask as Dionysos. However, Zarathustra’s invocation was a stroke of genius. It took him and his readers outside the magic and desiccated circle of Greek influences. He chose an older name than Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle— those heroes of our schools where, ever since Erasmus began to pray to Socrates; Paul has been shadowed by Plato, and Jesus by Socrates; where man does not blush in calling Christianity a philosophy and thereby proves that he does not know that the Cross came to end philosophy. Nietzsche’s mask as Zarathustra erects the legislator in place of the critic, or the thinker, as the Dionysian aspect of Christ. Two years before the end, with its outcries as God and as the Crucified, he jotted into a notebook: “The Refutation of God: Refuted is the moral God only.” He had to annihilate the Platonic and Aristotelian aspect of God, not the living God of Job or Jesus, and in this one sentence, he revealed that he knew it. He smashed the three letters G O D because our Aristotelians and Platonists have mined them in treating G O D as the first cause or as an idea. To hell with such an idol. But Nietzsche was forbidden to use such terms as “Dionysian aspect of God,” or “Platonic aspect of God.” He had to represent the Dionysian aspect of God. Since he was alone, in his time, he could not make concessions. Anybody who is alone has to act like Nietzsche when he wishes to unearth a forgotten aspect of God. We later-borns have it easy. We are not alone. In fellowship, we can speak of the Dionysian “viewpoint,” but that we have any such fellowship we owe to Nietzsche’s outcry. In Plato’s and Aristotle’s universe, as in Voltaire’s, God had become a law of this universe, at best the watchmaker of a most complicated clockwork. Nietzsche ceased to ask for a God of the universe. He asked for the God of the pandemonium in ourselves. The Lawgiver is nearer to pandemonium than to the law. No legislator is possible who has not been between two societies, the society of the old laws which he derogates, and the society for which he makes laws. The greatest example is Moses at the time when he had smashed the first tables with the Ten Commandments. God then tempted him: “Abandon those Israelites. I shall give you another and better nation.” Can you fathom the abyss of that moment where he stood between two nations? Where the people he had made could now be rejected by him, his own law retracted? A new loyalty to a new people might have started then and there, in his heart. What is the human heart, in such an extreme hour? It is beside itself, ecstatic; it certainly has left behind the constitutional, established social order.

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25

Exactly this moment in Moses corresponds to the Dionysian aspect of any man who breaks and gives laws, and it is even more clearly than in Moses to be found in Jesus. The Divinity of Man is in this moment because here he makes epoch, sets the boundary lines of historical periods, creates Times of a different order, abolishes laws which—to the naive—always seem to be unalterable cosmic laws. Man as abolishing cosmic laws is divine. Nietzsche called man back into his divinity, at the price of taking away from him all naturalness, all “thing-ness.” If man recognizes his pandemonian origin, he may ascend to heaven. If he insists on remaining a thing in nature, he decays.

CHAPTER FOUR THE PERILS OF INTELLECTUAL SPACES (DESCARTES AND NIETZSCHE) (1956) EUGEN ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY TRANSLATED BY JÜRGEN LAWRENZ

Editors’ note. This chapter is the final item in the Conclusion section of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s Soziologie I: Die Übermacht der Räume (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1956), 315ff. Translator’s note. The title of this essay is Die Raumnot der Gebildeten. Raumnot conveys a deliberately ambiguous impression of something vaguely claustrophobic and procrustean: a “space” lacking elbow room and thereby disabling the intellectuals who are so cloistered (caught intellectually in the grip of spatial and temporal “quarters”) that they cannot give wings to their thought.

I

N THIS FIRST VOLUME,

inner space and outer space have each come into their own. Against my own nature (as indicated in my preface), I filled up the first volume with these two spaces because I am, after all, obliged to concede that I am a product of the modern era, its pathways of communications, and my own so-called education. Thanks to this education the book is being printed. Thanks to this education we understand one another, despite the Thirty Years’ War, despite having had two World Wars. Accordingly, I must give education its due, before I can pull the reader away from it. The modern era has mechanistic undertones and artistic overtones. It dominates us through the work of two men and two philosophies. We have succumbed to them. We should speak of them so that we don’t remain entrapped by them! Let us speak of Descartes, and Nietzsche! René Descartes’ mother died shortly after childbirth; when Friedrich Nietzsche was five years old, his father had a fatal accident. These two events—here, the disappearance of a father; there, of a mother—befell

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Chapter Four

these men who respectively embody the beginning and the end of the modern era. These events created a one-generational time, a time of being without ancestor or heir. The damage wrought by fate is drawn in sublime lines on the profiles of these two thinkers. Because of them, the break of continuity among generations became the stigma of the modern era, for it succumbed on one side to a notion of automatic progress, on the other to the spirit of the age, the Zeitgeist. Only rarely, it seems, have two social accidents driven those involved to such extremes. L’esprit français and deutscher Geist, clarté and Erlebnis, mathematics and music, science and the arts of Europe are the achievements made possible by this moment. But in Descartes, there also appears for the first time the scholastic small-mindedness that drew the comment from Adolf Harnack, speaking at the Imperial Schools Conference of 1920, that “we are surely narrow enough, already.” Yet with Nietzsche this wretchedness dared to step forward into the glare of light. The technical progress of the last 300 years could only have been accomplished by the adoption of Descartes’ perspective; while its limitations could be observed no sooner than in the temporal spot occupied by Nietzsche. Accordingly, the Descartes who embodied a stand-point, the Nietzsche who ensouled a time-point, must be our common concern. They manifest the overwhelming potency of the external and internal spaces that this first volume has addressed. Yet Nietzsche is still so close to us, both temporally and topologically, that we have no difficulty in drawing from his biography—and what a headlong race this life was!—the lines by which his fatherless thinking was configured and whipped along. A predetermined profession is a crutch on which we can hobble along the common rut, without, in a pinch, undergoing any kind of personal development. But Nietzsche’s bridge into this predetermined vocation collapsed. He was thrown upon his own creature-resources. Only then did he have to draw conclusions from his experiences. And these included his fatherless estate. It would not be as readily obvious to today’s reader that the juvenile earnestness of Cartesius—who, by the way, insisted on being called “Descartes,” thereby revealing his most humanly approachable trait, the joy in his paternity—that this desperate earnestness and boyish gravity extended even to an acknowledgment of his body as a machine, is no less coincidental than Nietzsche’s own adult playfulness. Nietzsche never lacked the harmless babble with mother and sister. Just this, however, was denied to the motherless Descartes. He never

The Perils of Intellectual Spaces (1956)

29

found relaxation from the formal stringency prevalent among grown men, with its presumption of standing by one’s given word. Long before he matured, the child was reduced to a single point of view. But where no mother’s lap exists (and Descartes was throughout his life of such frail health that the doctors did not expect him to live a long life), the motherless child calmly and imperturbably must try to learn to stand up. As compensation for the forbidden tears, the child received from God’s hands a genius for geometry. It is very touching now to observe how this knowing child Descartes accounts for his genius for solving the new problems of mathematics: namely, as a gift of mere reasoning power such as any man might be entitled to. Hence it was from Descartes onward that we confuse the creative spirit with the reproductive spirit, the mere teacher of philosophy with the philosopher. In other words, the ability to think a thought for the very first time is obviously housed in a very different province of our anatomy from that where previous thinking can be resurrected. This distinction did not occur to the virtuous Descartes. He restricted himself to addressing the mind in general. The genius that stood in for his mother and granted him the most wonderful fruits of his life—such as giving birth to analytical geometry as an entirely new science—this genius remained unnamed, unspecified by him. His wish was to be understood, man to man. Nietzsche turned the tables on him in this. He was aware of his uniqueness (though in its own way this applies as much to Descartes as well). Descartes’ gain from this disregard of his own genius gave him the opportunity to be a man of the world. A home doesn’t need a firm standpoint, but the world does.1 The world wants to know, implacably, what is going on. Geometry accordingly gave Descartes the means to equate the outer world of society with the outer world of mathematics. Ever since his time, we have adhered to the absurd equation, world = physical world. But what does physical mean? Nothing other than describable by word and number. Everything can become physical. The day will come when mathematics can replace psychology, sociology and theology. Physis, the Garden of Eden for Plato, is physics now; and life is a corpse. Men retain their measured mien when struck by life’s highest manifestations. They don’t cry and they don’t laugh. They master mass, energy, nature. And so we come to that monstrous proposition: “My principle is that everything that exists remains forever in the same condition in which we find it, unless an external cause brings about a change.”2 This proposition has been lorded over the educated classes ever since. It governs the mechanics of the external space, recognized by [Peter]

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Yorck von Wartenburg as a ubiquitous watermark in the educational systems of modern times.3 To this method we owe space travel to Mars, as much as the cobalt bomb. And if it is right, then we will never need to die, for mere machine defects are, after all, remediable. By this quirk of thought, although not intending it, Descartes exchanged the immortality of the soul for the immortality of the body. For all loss of life would in this case be due to external factors. One might fall in love with such adolescent courage. Alas, life is temporal. Death is not attached to life from the outside, but from the inside. The price to be paid for a life is its finitude; and completion, or death, is fused with it at the moment of birth. Those who die before their time, such as Descartes’ mother, prove nothing other than this inescapable truth. Of course, if a man does not want to cry because men are not supposed to cry, then he must overlook death. That transcendental ego, the intellectual, remains quite impersonal when he is up against death. But an impersonal attitude toward death is tantamount to not understanding it. For death is the one event in our life that we cannot look upon with equanimity: We must grieve. But science will not let us do this. Science must see everything; and this demands equanimity. Accordingly science cannot understand anything that equanimity cannot touch. There is an enormous gulf between a death in the community and a death in the external physical world. Yet Descartes exhorts us to ignore it. Generalized knowledge is narrow knowledge, because our highest capabilities— especially genius, precisely as in the creation of analytical geometry by Descartes himself—stem from the temporality of our existence. On the other hand, general understanding, to which the modest Descartes falsely subordinated his genius, is merely the common understanding—the replaceable machine part that cannot die because it has never lived. An equanimous mind never innovates! And thus did Descartes in his thinking on the soul—which is our power of laying life upon its foundation of temporality—confuse it with his inventory of machine parts. The good man denies his wish to cry and shed tears. Soul means a kind of stock exchange of thoughts, where his can be traded for anyone else’s! Wherever this proposition is regarded as valid, we are in modern thinking. It is an attempt to see how far we can go with the assumption that the universe is dead. This theory, this way of looking at it, can go some considerable way—indeed, from Mars to Hiroshima.

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But life surmounts this world of death. It rebuilt even Hiroshima. Death cannot explain the living. It occludes it, after all. Descartes overlooked death; and thus he missed its principal feature, namely, its highly personal character. This is just what the existentialists of today bring forward when they censure idealism. So the question is: What is left out by this passion, this capacity for overlooking, by this feeling that we can stand above it all? Socrates did not wish to sweat blood like Jesus in Gethsemane. Accordingly, he taught a hygienic form of dying. But we owe it to the submissive Lord that we know the fruits of death. It is desirable for the sake of the reader’s independence that he is directed to the letter written by Descartes to Princess Elisabeth. For here, the expressions soul and thinking are used throughout without discrimination, as if the writer thought them interchangeable.4 A German book published in 1904 even placed Geist und Leib, Körper und Seele (“Spirit and Body, Physique and Soul”) on the title page, the author evidently convinced of having said the same thing twice. But people who blink piously, even though they are Cartesians, incidentally prefer such mixed and nebulous locutions as Willy Hellpach’s “spiritually soul-like,” which he must have used to avoid committing himself while fishing for Christian votes.5 Most of our contemporaries never get around to a decision on psychics and pneumatics, or on St. Paul and the Humanists. They are all and sundry Cartesians, more than they suspect. This confusion elicited Nietzsche’s despair: “Once and for all, I am neither body nor spirit, but something third.6” The “standpoint” is usually chosen in such a manner as to plausibly request that others share it, since otherwise communication would break down. Yet Nietzsche emphasized throughout his life: “Whatever occupies, grieves, and exalts me, for this I have never had a confidant or friend; what a pity there is no God, so that at least One might know.”7 On this score, however, it was Descartes’ greatest satisfaction to have formulated a universally valid law. For Nietzsche it is merely a deep yearning: My soul, a play upon harp strings, Sings a barcarole to itself. Did anyone listen?8

Or, in one pithy formula: Nietzsche dedicated himself to the playful, yet grown-up, masculine time-point; Descartes to the boyish gravity of the stand-point researcher.

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Mathematics seems to be a sober pursuit when contrasted with Nietzsche’s Dionysian attitude, which looks more like a bacchantic orgy. But all the same, the man of computation, Descartes, and the merry dancer of life, Nietzsche—they seem to me damnably alike. They were both tender souls whose sufferings transformed their genius. Praise to their tenderness! Praise to their sufferings! So, just as we have to thank Descartes for the physical space defined as a lawlike extension, Nietzsche gave us a newly appointed play space—a playground and the Olympic racetrack, where the laws of physical extension have no application. Why is this so? Here we are brought back to our first part: Every play space is inserted as a second enclosure into the physical space. Accordingly, the rules of the game that prevail here differ from those of physics. In this space we need have no compunction to picture for ourselves the chariots of the contestants, for example, “Helios in glorious Majesty,” while on the outside there is nothing to be observed but “the featureless movement of a fireball.” There is, however, a particular reason that Nietzsche does not stand before us, true and clear, in his anti-Cartesian achievement. The great Dionysian could scarcely construct his achievement on a dialectical scaffolding! Everyone knows that Karl Marx did, in his opposition to Hegel. And on this account we nowadays imagine that all philosophy moves along in a continuously dialectical pattern. But under this premise, Nietzsche will remain misunderstood. For Nietzsche, the young god of playful intoxication, emerged from the actor Richard Wagner. Nietzsche wished to become the “heir of Wagner” (mentioned twice in his letters). But Nietzsche distinguished between play and the playhouse: The play perishes in the player (Schauspieler). Nonetheless, he admits, in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, that he owes to Wagner—the actor, founder of his own playhouse, and bewitcher of his audiences—his deepest insights into the nature of play. Only: Bayreuth is theater, exhibitionism. The secret, however, of the liturgist who plays before God (Guardini), and the secret of the holy child in Nietzsche who plays out his life while holding a devil’s mask over his face—the secret (in other words) of pure play—must be set apart from staged play acting. The magnificent opposition offered by Nietzsche to Descartes is overlooked precisely because Nietzsche never developed antithetically to Descartes. Physicists and artists have, from 1600 to our day, always lived side by side, like parallel strands. Goethe compressed it even to a triple strand with religion:

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If science and art are your possessions, then you also have religion.

So mathematicians may find the playhouse agreeable. The research scientist condescends to give equal rights to the artist. This equilibrium Nietzsche was compelled to destroy. Neither the calculating mathematician nor the calculative actor; neither the painter executing his picture, nor the architect working on his commission, nor the dramatist striving to conquer the stage, nor indeed the theater director Goethe or the poetizing Goethe, as holder of German Federation Privileges: None is independent of his audience and of purposeful showmanship. Planck and Furtwängler are not enough. Thus idealism fraudulently abrogates Art for itself—after all, art is not just a paid job but (much worse!) it has to be seen, heard, and disseminated—what Nietzsche retrieved for the innocent free dance of the playful life and what only divinatory souls might share with him. He is Prince Vogel-frei: only fool, only poet; Zarathustra; libertarian; first, a camel, then a lion; and in the end, a child.9 In a thousand characters he sought to escape from an ideal of art and science that horrified him. He profiled this interplay of artist and scientist most splendidly in the epigram: “The pathos of the highest genre can be achieved only in play.”10 A schema may help:

Pure Knowledge

Pure Acting

Descartes

Richard Wagner

instead of humorless scholarship

instead of theatrical buffoonery Precursors Schopenhauer The Gay Science serious playing Zarathustra Friedrich Nietzsche

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Because Nietzsche then backed off from Wagner’s stage play and turned to play itself—and in addition cast off the pessimist Schopenhauer so that he could exalt gaiety—it was unnecessary for him to confront Descartes. But here precisely is the reason why he takes his place beside Descartes. If we wish to shake ourselves free from the Hegel-Marx intermezzo, help is at hand from this divinely free pairing-off between Descartes and Nietzsche. They are not antithetical to each other. Nietzsche wanted only to be free; and interestingly he interrogated Descartes on the latter’s freedom in just those moments when Descartes stared at only the law, instead of at his own genius. As a child might play obliviously with shells at the seashore, so should Nietzsche’s “man” devote himself obliviously to his titanic contests. For to pile Ossa upon Pelion is a game fit for Titans. No one should remain a spectator: The smaller the audience, the more life there is! Death to spectators, life to the players! Thinkers on the universe and singers in their play space have nested themselves in our psyche with their sacramental formulae. Cogito ergo sum: here is the stern voice of the unsheltered child seeking safety in his thoughts and protection against ridicule. Paul Valéry gave a wonderful interpretation of this sigh from the heart.11 “To love is to spare someone shame.”12 This is Nietzsche’s deepest utterance. Since he did not speak in generalities, it is much less known than the Cogito. Yet at his grave in Röcken, on August 28, 1900, this sentence served as his obituary. This shows that eleven years after his collapse, he remained vividly present to his faithful apostles in those words. In the realm of freedom, such a necrologue means as much as would the agreement of all parties in the realm of mathematics. Where a thinker may say without shame, “I” think, “I” am, the lover must speak more reticently, “My soul is like a lyre.” How much seriousness in this soul! But for precisely this reason he must draw a delicate veil of modesty around his soul with the vocable play: Saitenspiel—the lyre that plays. The spirit (Geist) knows nothing of shame, nor does nature. But a soul can be killed by nakedness. Therefore soul and spirit (Geist) are incommensurable and not to be confused with each other. The “spirit-soul” from which the intellectual brigade has suffocated since 1789 is nothing but gibberish.13 Descartes could never have conceived of this truth. For the spirit of science thrives on generalities, making everything impersonal by their pronouncements. Because in the space of a mere soul, nakedness kills, Descartes closed off this space, and as is well known, the word shame exists in this realm only to be instantly dissolved in acid. Everything

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becomes subject to analysis. Conversely, Nietzsche closed himself off from the spectator, because when the spirit looks at the soul, the soul disappears. Since all philosophy now reckons with only One Space, neither Descartes nor Nietzsche can be fully transparent to us. Only through acknowledgment of the doubling of spaces is it possible to understand the mutuality of their impact. As soon as we have understood, we can leave their epoch behind us. Each of them invoked a particular kind of space. That’s why they still demand one more serious disquisition. Voluminous, detailed studies stand behind it; but in this place a few brief strokes will suffice. René Descartes was born in 1596 in the Touraine; his father officiated at the Parliament of Rouen and brought up the boy till he was either nine or twelve (the dates are in dispute).14 Then he was enrolled in the Jesuit College of La Flêche, a boarding school, where he stayed for nine years. Etienne Gilson has shown how much of this learning Descartes retained for life. However, when he left in 1615, Descartes felt at ease only with his creative powers as a mathematician. All his other learning seemed to him confused and uncertain, a regrettable waste of time. “No more of this; let us concentrate on certain knowledge,” became his motto. Financially independent, as he remained through life, the chevalier traveled and eventually landed in Holland. Here he met his elder Pylades, who ennobled the motherlessness of this Orestes by protective friendship. It was Beeckman, eight years Descartes’ senior, who helped him in 1618 to formulate his Method. Both wanted to ground physics in mathematics and combat raw empiricism and scepticism with it. When we consider that Beeckman was 30, and Descartes 22 years old, we might sense something of the buffer of security the former provided for his protégé. Beeckman’s discovery of Descartes represents the latter’s conception.15 A year later this discovery had strengthened him to such an extent that his dream, or rather three dreams, at the tile stove in Ulm put the task of his life clearly before his eyes. His pilgrimage to Loreto six years later was his thanksgiving to heaven for this insight. He will deduce all facts of the physical world and weave a necklace of mathematics around the plenum of sciences: There is, in the end, only one kind of knowledge. We are primarily interested in the fertile womb from which this immense courage of Descartes sprang up; and in addition to the mystery of this meeting, and the even more mysterious acknowledgment by Beeckman, who although eight years older, seems not to have had a jealous bone in his body.

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We know of the first embrace by this older friend only through recent discoveries. But we have always known and emphasized that another man, eight years his senior—the Parisian monk Mersenne (1588-1646)—had a determining and energizing influence on Descartes.16 Descartes wrote 138 letters to Mersenne, who played the role of a distributor of philosophical and scientific correspondence from all over Europe, and thus figures as the forerunner to the later practice of collecting such writings in professional journals.17 The writers clustered around Mersenne thus formed a kind of Society of the Friends of Research, based on their mutual interests (just as, more recently, the German community of scientists were driven by exigency to associate with each other in their common need).18 Once again, then, an older man spread a “maternal” sense of care over his frail protégé, presumably four years after Ulm (1623) and while Descartes’ dream mission of a new Method was stuck in a rut. Mersenne managed to prop up this tender espalier fruit by his interest and participation, and succeeded eventually in readying it for its mature blossoming. The “insemination” by Beeckman and the “husbandry” of Mersenne were augmented another five years later by the exhortation of Cardinal Bérulle: Do not waste your patrimony. You owe it to your dream vision to take steps to implement it.19 Only now was the lassitude of the chevalier, the gentleman, cast aside; only now, in 1628, was his leisurely sojourning in Holland turned into an inner pilgrimage and the construction begun of a coherent account of Le Monde as a world in extension. Another five years hence—with the book almost completed—news arrived from Rome of Galileo’s indictment. Once again he beats a retreat. Le Monde is withdrawn from publication. Thus in 1618, 1623, 1628, and 1632-1633, this man of the world allowed himself to be cajoled, stimulated, committed, and determined. But the expected utterance did not come forth. At last, however, in 1637, all these maternal cares materialize in a publication. Without any paternal or pedagogical authority, and without Descartes having taught anything to anyone, remaining throughout the chevalier—the Discours de la Méthode appeared. History all too easily overlooks the meaning of this grandiloquent hesitation. When we look back, we glide quickly along the years. But in truth these men, Mersenne and Beeckman, Bérulle as well as Galileo, stood before Descartes like motherly figures, or if not motherly, then as friends from a higher altitude, ready to prepare him for this most difficult task, the creation of a new Method. For ultimately facts do not change reality, only the way we think about it.

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Method is a Greek word from the same stable as geometry and mathematics. I have shown elsewhere how the modern addition of a Greek vocabulary from a sense of individual shock and societal reflection chiseled out a new professional compartment.20 The “shock” came from the collision with vernacular speech, which reflected Latin words; but only the Greek terms brought mastery in their wake. Art concentrates this shock upon us as individuals—for example, the Magic Fire Music from Wagner’s Ring employs the word fire. But in the end, the Greek brings up the pyrotechnics of scientific nomenclature. In communal life the blessings of fire—rather than its terrors—are pictured in the Benedictio Ignis of the Mass. God became divinitas in the schools of the Middle Ages, and still today the doctor “of divinity” denotes the doctor who learned from God. But the “science” of the divine is named theology, in contrast to ordinary deism. Similarly, world becomes nature for us children of the world in our communal representations, but physics for Descartes, because he made of the object nature a problem of pure science. The way proceeds from the startled cry of One, via the object of the Community, to the problem for the Profession. I have analyzed the book title of the well-known work by Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World. Three times the same word occurs: World, as spoken in common language; Nature in the language of communal tradition; and Physical in the language of the professional scientist. What sense can we affix to this use of the same word in three different guises: once with the popular, once with the church, and once with the scientific nomenclature? Well, it makes precisely this sense: that since Descartes and the Cartesians, only their word carries a meaning that is indispensable to the irreversibility of intellectual progress. The inferior school grammar of the various vernacular forms of speech remains for the intellectual just that: inferior. We get serious only when we juggle around with several languages. Our man is the one who can translate the Magic Fire and the Theft of Fire by Prometheus first into the language of nature and then into the language of physics. World expresses that I, the speaker, stand before it and am enveloped by it as something unknowable, frightening, and awesome. Nature says that we—not you alone, nor I alone, but we as a community—have it before us as Something Other. We have already turned our face toward it, but we have not mastered it. Physics denotes that we have sequestered from among us a number of experts who shall master that awe on our behalf. They act for us with this specific brief in their

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pocket, that they shall tame this dreaded dragon world and lay it before our feet as motors or bombs. Speakers, advocates, philologists; warriors, the military, strategists; morality and ethics—all form similar series of world, nature, physics. In Descartes we find the perfectly constructed model of such a three-tiered linguistic campaign. From this stems our belief that one day all experiments will be reductions; that politics, sex, eternal life, the hidden God, progress itself, and even love will be expressible quantitatively. Psychological questionnaires favor such questions as “Whom do you love more: your father or your mother?” It might well have come directly from Descartes, for they express nothing so much as the motherless longing that wants to get by without a mother’s love. But where questions ask, “How much?” the human being has become an incidental factor; love has dropped out of sight. The consequences of Cartesianism prove the truth of the old saying that no path is forever the true path. The motto on our title page has been extracted gratefully from the wise old Mommsen; and our Cross of Reality shows by itself that every method is just one direction, but cannot ever become a one-way street.21 Descartes himself was an authentic human being. For he bestowed on his age a new task, hesitating with every fiber of his being before finally committing himself to it fully. Yet what he created, a particular standpoint or perspective, is of a purely temporary nature. If we ignore the real Descartes and immerse ourselves solely in his comical splitting-up of reason and object in space, then schizophrenia is our lot. This disease occupies the top spot among the paranoid conditions in the USA at the end of modern times. Nietzsche recognized this. He coursed along the one-way street in the opposite direction: from physics to nature, and from nature to world. He began with Greek, passed through Latin, and tumbled, in panic and terror, into the beyond of the Persian Zarathustra. Because Descartes was able to appeal to a long line of authorities from Parmenides to Proclus for his grotesque partition between spirit and body, Nietzsche alighted from the Greek ship. This is the meaning of his choice of the name Zarathustra, of his attacks on Socrates. Both are justified. Nietzsche was brought up by his mother until he was twelve. Then his schooling began, which lasted for eight years. He claimed to remember that as early as age seven, two years after the death of his father, he felt sure that he would always be alone in the world. A remarkable trait! And Nietzsche was forever concerned that anyone who was important to him should definitely be aware of it. This is nothing other than putting up a

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fence to keep the “other” at arm’s length. When Heinrich von Stein confessed to him that he understood maybe twelve sentences in the whole of Zarathustra, Nietzsche was overjoyed. To understand more, let alone all of it, would have entitled his opposite number to close the gap between them and obliterate the Primary Nietzschean Dogma: “I am forever alone. I cannot conceive of ever being loved.”22 This basic experience is therefore no actual experience, but a dogma. It is why Nietzsche spoke and wrote in a different style to every addressee, accommodating to their language and perceiving in his behavior the element of eternal play. Accordingly, he was forced to penetrate behind all these thousand masks of which he wrote incessantly, if ever he wished to step into the open air as himself. What he pulled out from behind all these temporary masks, all these accommodations, all these superficialities, for display in their real depth, were standpoints for special purposes, which had to fall away so that the punctum saliens, the “Man, Friedrich Nietzsche,” might step forward unmistakably. In geometry all points are interchangeable. In a man, the soul confers uniqueness. But this implies eschewal of generalities, at once those of the experts (Nietzsche ceased being a philologist) as of the clerics (Nietzsche renounced his affiliation to any confession). For he had ceased to have a “nature.” He discovered, and we learned it from him (just as we learned through Descartes that we can fly), that every increase in authentic life involves a concomitant loss of “nature.” Man is nature, enemy of nature, unnatural, and above nature, all in one umbrous mixture. So Nietzsche runs, blasted by the desert storm of the Cartesian world picture, back into the folds of Socratic thinking; and in his terror-stricken panic traverses at breakneck pace the naves of the Latin credo and the bourgeois constitutions. He must descend into the primeval estate of Man, even to proto-Man. Since anything we can utter corresponds only to the depths we have actually probed, a primeval silence cloaks whatever is left unfathomed. The youthful atheist remembered (for all we can tell) his Protestant minister father quite fondly. But he did not have the kind of father-son experience that Joyce depicted in Ulysses. He did not achieve a sense of the expansion of speech from obedience to the received word, and thus missed out on its liberating capacity. Ever since Descartes, we have lost track of that fact that only a father and son, taken together, can explain what speaking and thinking means. That we are recognized by our father and named as his son is, to be sure, a legal fact; but too fundamental, apparently, to concern philosophers. Yet Nietzsche refused to be so designated, despite all piety for his angelic father. But it is common fact

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that every red Indian tribe, every family, state and church—in a word, every institution not yet enslaved to the pseudo-religion of art and science and “therefore” uneducated—stands on the back of appointments and abdications. His education prevented Nietzsche from acknowledging this. However, a particular temporal circumstance came into play that provided him with some justification. Fathers have always acknowledged their sons and named them, tacitly accepting in their turn the name Father, which involves the children’s right to his pedigree and to consider themselves his heirs. But when families or communities plunged into disorder, then the church held out a helping hand, specifically to repair a broken lineage by adopting the child for God, and thus closing the paternity gap. Nietzsche lost not only his father in 1849. In the same year we saw the beginning of the Mucker Era in Prussia, of whose impact on the schools even Wilamowitz-Möllendorf gave testimony in his Memoirs. Nietzsche swore eternal hatred to these Muckers and their disgusting fanaticism for the unity of throne and altar. On their account Nietzsche was cheated of a second chance for paternity. Not having a father deprives one of the measure between past and future, which is formulated in the sentence: “Therefore shall the son leave the house of his father and mother and cleave to the woman.” This meant so little to Nietzsche that he could never fall in love. He did not need a woman, although perhaps he needed a daughter who might cling to him with due marks of reverence!! As if (so it must seem) he wanted to drive out the Devil with Beelzebub. For the man of honor usually ends up marrying, to make sure that no one can cheat him of these marks of respect and make a fossil of him! We have already discussed Nietzsche’s irritation with familiarity. “People don’t know whom they’re dealing with,” was a daily, chastening exasperation. He wants to enforce distance, to be stand-offish. But what is this? In the mutual overpowering of the sexes, nothing like it can exist; it is common, however, in the relationships between the generations. Nietzsche at different times looked up to father figures, down on pupils. His “courtship” of Burckhardt was as unavoidable as his constant lookout for apostles and his complete break with all contemporaries. Honor is always multitemporal; but just this was denied to Nietzsche. For running down Descartes’ one-way street the wrong way exacted from Nietzsche a toll both unconscionably high and conducive to madness. It is however the price to be paid for every return to the father’s lap, before the scion is named and speech-bound: And thus Nietzsche was bound to impose on himself the demand to stay “forever young.”

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Nietzsche = Dionysus is the ancestor of the German youth movement. Dionysus is the son of Zeus (= Dios), or more accurately put, the younger part of Dios. The Romans had a clear conception of him: They worshipped below the Jupiter on the Capitol the young Jovis, called Vediovis. On account of his youth he was ve-sanus, raging like Dionysus. Perhaps we should for once take these two stages of the Zeus religion really seriously as aspects of gravity and play, because we are in any case in thrall to them. For then we have an approach to explaining Descartes and Nietzsche alike. Descartes wanted to be old at age 19; and Nietzsche young at age 44. What meaning shall we associate with Jovis and Vediovis? What does our being young or old consist of? Cardinal Newman converted in his forty-fifth year to Roman Catholicism. Gauguin wrote Noa Noa in his forty-fifth year. Goethe was forty-five when, in his striving for renewal, he found Schiller. Nietzsche fell victim to madness at the same age. Ever since my youth, this madness of Nietzsche has always been a significant part of his meaning to me. His collapse of 1889 did not estrange me from him. If you cannot, for example, understand that Hölderlin’s madness was Hölderlin’s madness, then you know nothing of his soul. Which is to say: If there is nothing that might ever make you lose your sanity (Verstand), then you have none to lose. Accordingly Nietzsche’s splendid health in spirit would be of no concern to me without his madness. Youth and age: both are imposed on us. Some youths must learn to become older; some elderly people must rejuvenate themselves. Old age and youth are primordial conditions of being, primordial facts of the social order. The soul as a stringed instrument, a lyre (Saitenspiel), belongs to only one of these primordial conditions of our life. The man of the Law and the Geometer each belongs to the other. Our chapter on the sexes and life’s stages have made this clear. Here now we encounter two one-way streets: On one of them, a precocious 23year-old declared all his previous experiences, all sense impressions as merely subjective and put them behind him in order to think henceforth only on such truths as can be thought repeatedly and consistently. That’s a sign of old age! An old man runs into the danger of knowing himself too well. But such is Descartes’ ambition. In opposition to that, Nietzsche smoothes his way as if for the first time. Every innervation is a path for the young. On these increasingly steep paths, finally hanging by his fingernails on a precipice of no return and almost in touch with lightning: This is how he sees himself.

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But only this way can he become an elixir of salvation for the modern era of educated philistines and actors that has abandoned itself to technology and sensations. His headlong tumble into an existence as such an elixir is characterized by the same pitiless conclusiveness as the standstill of Descartes. I have already confronted the purely accessory and, so to speak, bibliographical listing of Descartes’ writings and explained how the nonchalant chevalier, the gentilhomme moves slowly into his standpoint and settles down. I must add and emphasize that his procrastinations and hesitant occupation of the final standpoint brought it about that his Discours de la Méthode, which contains the Cogito statement, was not published until 19 years after his first meeting with Beeckman, and then anonymously and in French. Descartes’ first publication under his own name was delayed by another four years. He was then forty-five years old. This means that Descartes, too, in making the decision to adopt the thought processes of old age, to live in and through and postulate them, fixed them with finality as his standpoint only when this corresponded to his appropriate physical age. Before that he was the genius of geometry who received this special mission too early—albeit because of his genius. This chance event was fully embraced as his destiny only by the mature Descartes From this sprang his immense conviction and authenticity. Thanks to his waiting for his flesh and blood to grow into and suffuse with the thought processes that his flighty genius had already conquered, Descartes seems to us extraordinarily sound. He was neither an innovator nor a reactionary. Rather he was both, because his life grew into and intertwined with his mission. Since Descartes, as the thinker of the standpoint, had such difficulties with the final occupation of his standpoint before the world, he can illuminate for us the equally noble single-mindedness of Nietzsche. The chevalier who made himself Descartes corresponds to the philologist who made himself Nietzsche. In the latter’s wake came the Wagner apostle, culture critic, seer, and dancer; the soul as a play upon the lyre; the playful son of Zeus, Vediovis, a raging youth, young in his rage: they chase each other, one after another, in fifteen short years. But since he wants to apply his medicine to the age, he must turn himself into a poison. There is in all of us a persistent struggle going on between function and freedom. The chevalier Descartes continually backs off from the danger of becoming a function; for 45 years he maintains his freedom. Nietzsche however pays the price of turning his youth into a function, into an elixir, which is that he may never adopt a standpoint. For what kind of function does he represent? An impeccable devotion to the grave and

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sublime play of life, beyond all purposes or “works” of art. If just one drop of this elixir should be wasted by spilling out of its cup; if the rejuvenating pharmacopeia fails to touch new furrows, virgin soil, unexplored pathways of the word; if it should fall instead into provinces well trodden, into involution or the second, aging half of life, then the scene from Auerbach’s Cellar in Faust must repeat itself. In Faust, the drinkers spill a few drops of the magic potion and suddenly all is in flames. The stony ground of age first became noticeable in Nietzsche beneath the topsoil of youth at that moment, when his dogma of the eternal return revealed the finger of fate on his own impending doom. To this dogma we must therefore return, for it is connected to the fatherless and un-heired estate of the man. The difference between paganism and Christianity is the difference between the circle and the cross. Time among the Indians and Greeks is a cycle. Everything returns to its starting point. In Volume II we will see that a tremendous, positive contribution was made when it was recognized that without the cycles, the cross too would lose its meaning.23 But Nietzsche relied naively and throughout life on the open temporality of our era for his own life. He wished himself to be the turning spindle of epochs, the elixir of the millennium. But this could only eventuate if that newness was possible to which only the spirit of the present two open millennia can give access. Nietzsche’s soul however was so sure in its post-Christian freedom that his mind felt free to play with the circle, the cycle, the transmigration of souls and the eternal return of the previous epochs. That his “J’ai vu,” his “exactly as it has been,” was at first a mere toy to play with, follows from his slip into very bad taste when he described his pure play-spirit book Zarathustra as his—“Son”! He even called himself the father of Zarathustra. But it pervades all his correspondence and is not a simple derailing. Nevertheless it is perverse, even though it must have seemed a compelling image to him. For “giving birth,” “being pregnant,” “conceiving”—also these feminine vocables indicative of creativity were “terms of the trade” among artists of the time, and nowhere more so than in Bayreuth. The more Nietzsche distanced himself from the play actor, however, the less appropriate it seemed to call himself the “mother” of his productions. Maybe this is how the “Father of Zarathustra” came about.24 Then we can at least excuse him, for the son leaves the father free. Which means: There is no doctrine proclaimed in Zarathustra to which the “father of the son Zarathustra” was bound. Nonetheless two dangers eventuated fatefully from all this. These two dangers led to his collapse. The first may be explained by recourse to a comparison. Goethe’s de facto marriage and his extramarital

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children displeased the court preacher, Herder. Goethe broke with him when Herder permitted himself the joke that “he still preferred The Natural Daughter [Goethe’s play, which was a flop] to his natural son.” When Nietzsche tossed his “son Zarathustra” into every suitable or unsuitable conversation, Jakob Burckhardt once murmured, “I wish you would procreate a living son.” In other words, the image transfer from the female womb to artistic creativity is less untrue or objectionable than fatherhood confused with writing books. And why? Because fatherhood expresses an act that involves naming and acknowledgment in public. One may compare a mother with an artist, for body and articulation differ significantly. But the higher potency of fatherhood of the grave Zeus, and on the other side the games played by the little Zeus with his nurses, the attendants of Dionysius—these are not permissible comparisons. Here we find masculine weight and childish play in the same domain of the word doing the same work. It cannot be done: One cannot mix them up with impunity. But now they were mixed up. And in the outcome his written and printed work turned back on him with increasing force and sucked the writer himself into the ring of fire of his own utterances. In the first we are free, in the second we are slaves. We begin to age when our own words stand up against us and bind us in fetters. And so we age. It means religion: How shall I begin, in accordance with the rules? You set up the rule yourself, and then you follow it.25

From his own brew did Nietzsche imbibe the poison that translated him out of the future-oriented, open-ended time of our calendar into the cyclic carousel of extra-Christian eras. He was overtaken by his own doctrine of the eternal return. Nietzsche signed his last missives with “The Crucified.” It is the moment when he destroyed himself. The young Nietzsche was compelled to exaggerate his fragment: He needed exaggeration, concentration, by virtue of seeing himself as a medicament. Where everyone represented his own standpoint, past or present, Nietzsche was obliged to live through his time-point thinking with such exclusiveness that the standpoint-man might yet be forced to remember having a leg available for playing. The leg to stand on and the leg to dance on: this is how the Cartesian and Nietzschean image entered the stream of our education. Descartes and Nietzsche both stepped up to the terminus ultimus—one in the world’s mortuary chamber and the other in the play space of the Inner. Already they point beyond the times that bear their stamp: All we

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need do is to take them seriously in their interplay. For then they will be seen to testify to that overwhelming potency of their spaces, which the current generation will have to root out. Both are intrinsically of the same age, because they lived without being conjoined to the generations before and after them. These spaces mesmerize us, who think of our time as something other than those spaces. We shall be compelled to forge treaties with the spirits of other times in order to survive the spaces. Multi-temporal shall those become who put their trust into this first volume. Other time-fettered figures have had their impact on us: Buddha and Lao-tse, Kant and Freud, Descartes and Nietzsche. But tribes and peoples themselves live in a multi-temporal plenum, in the fullness of times. Jürgen Lawrenz emigrated to Australia from Germany, and lectured at the University of Sydney. He has written several original works on philosophy, including manuscripts and essays on pre-Socratic thought, Descartes, Kant, Leibniz, and metaphysics.

PART II ROSENZWEIG AND ROSENTOCK-HUESSY: THE STAR AND THE CROSS— AFFINITIES AND DIFFERENCES

CHAPTER FIVE FROM THE STAR OF REDEMPTION TO THE CROSS OF REALITY ON THE OCCASION OF THE COMPLETION OF EUGEN-ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY’S SOZIOLOGIE

(1959) GEORG MÜLLER TRANSLATED BY C. ROLAND VOGT

Editors’ note. We are indebted to Prof. Dr. Richard Müller-Dombois, Georg Müller’s son, for permitting us to use his father’s essay, “Vom Stern der Erlösung zum Kreuz der Wirklichkeit,” Sonderdruck aus “Junge Kirche” (1959) for this volume.

E

UGEN ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY’S FRIENDS are delighted and feel blessed that this seventy-year-old man has lived long enough to complete his main work in sociology. They know that the Soziologie completes the conversation with the spirit of his young friend Franz Rosenzweig, who died in 1929. It is our hope that Rosenstock-Huessy’s inexhaustible energy has now fully disclosed the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in this, the culmination of his work on speech. Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption appeared in 1921; subsequent comments on it were undertaken by him in 1925 with the title “The New Thinking,” (Das Neue Denken).1 Rosenstock already talks of this speech-thinking (Sprachdenken) and “The New Thinking” in their correspondence of 1916.2 For both Rosenstock and Rosenzweig, it is about ways of addressing God and man in ways that are different from those usually posited by conventional philosophical and theological notions. Eugen Rosenstock’s speech-thinking unmasks the existentialism of the last few decades. This existentialism is insufficient because its leading exponents have not summoned the courage to free themselves from the taboos of 400-year-old habits of thinking.

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Eugen Rosenstock has been identified as the only contemporary sociologist who recognizes and uncovers the quality of time. Even in 1916, Franz Rosenzweig spoke of “philosophizing in the form of a calendar.” This expression hints at the fact that historical time, which pays tribute to the epochs involving God and the time-sequences of human history, is taken seriously. Together the two friends transcended a taboo that dominates the overwhelming majority of contemporary sociologists’ case studies clamoring about the fate of humankind. The taboo is the prohibition against allowing conceptual thinking to recognize the existence of God, but legitimating conceptual thinking when considering mere objects. But God is no object. Eugen Rosenstock feels himself at odds with these sociologists, “who hold their natural reason for that one instrument with which we can dominate time”: What these men and women declare to be natural is only their Greek or Old Testament or ancient or pre-Christian reason. They always write books about the “newest thing,” but by themselves (Carl) Jaspers, Max Weber, (Hans) Freyer, and (Alexander) Rüstow are ready to think in a preChristian fashion. This is due to the fear of otherwise losing the crown of their scientific being. I, however, am a prisoner to the Word at its time and hour. I am not rooted in a country or soil of reason, and I do not fancy myself to be at home with my Soziologie before the acceptable year of the Lord.3

I have already compared the basic thoughts of Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock in “Religionsphilosophie und Heilsgeschichte,” (the philosophy of religion and the history of salvation).4 There I cite Rosenzweig’s own words about his Star of Redemption, where he says it is not supposed to be seen as a work of Jewish philosophy, but as a “gift that the German Geist owes its Jewish enclave.” Herewith is said that Rosenzweig felt indebted to German idealism and—regardless of his avowal to the way Israel understood God—believed himself to be able to philosophize about religion. It is apparently this feeling that is just not possible to someone like Eugen Rosenstock. This is particularly the case for the single reason that he, through his friend, transcended the second taboo of our modern anthropological and sociological endeavor—namely, the taboo of a real history of salvation. In contrast to Franz Rosenzweig, who at age of 28 was consciously turning toward Judaism, Eugen Rosenstock placed, from the beginnings of his own thinking, the act of salvation of God in Christ at the center of his experience and thinking. In a letter of January 1957 he avows:

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I woke up as a Christian, wanted to be a minister at the age of 15. From sixth or ninth form onward—I do not quite remember this anymore—I took part in Christian religion classes, and above all, also in the choral rehearsals. We had a fantastic choir organist, Kawerau, at whose memory my heart still laughs: the Händel, Bach, the high Christian Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost celebrations at home were most moving. My grandfather was director in Wolfenbüttel, and had admitted Christian students to the school. And vice versa, my mother attended the highly Protestant teacher seminary at Wolfenbüttel palace. An old, very imposing great-uncle had been very active with my mother to convince me. He was an active Protestant … When I, at the age of 17, went to the minister to ask to be baptized, it all appeared to me as belatedly making up. The event did not leave me with the least bit of an emotional memory. On the contrary. I was never converted!

And the friend Rosenzweig testified at the high time of their spiritfriendship that the God of thought never represented a temptation for Eugen Rosenstock. The God of thought was the conceptually understood God of the philosophers, from which he—Rosenzweig—had only liberated himself under the influence of his younger friend. About this event Rosenstock himself reports: In 1916, it was only elucidated to me, by way of letters, what had remained concealed from me in 1913: In June, Franz gave the impression of having overcome, and until September he had thought that the experienced conviction by a living God would force him to become a Christian. Apparently I had exclaimed in despair: “Yes, I just call upon my Lord and run into church and try to pray, in order to contrast “philosophy” with “Here I stand.” But then he experienced on the high Jewish holidays of the year, in September, that a path of life would be applicable to him through recourse to his Judaism.

Both came from liberal Jewish homes; but whereas the one was from his background an anima naturaliter christiana, the other had to become a Jew out of a background as a Neo-Kantian. I summarize: Common to both thinkers is the recognition of a living God who prohibits us from philosophizing in a conceptual way about God and people, the way we philosophize about things. Both differ in the sense that their mutual understanding of God carries Jewish or Christian characteristics. Therefore, it can be said of Rosenstock that he not only transcended “God’s taboo against being science-centered” but also the “late bourgeois taboo against a real history of salvation.”5 This corresponds with the comparable heading mentioned above, “The philosophy of religion and the history of salvation,” which I chose at the

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time. That one can only speak with reservations, in Judaism, about the history of salvation was shown by no one else as clearly as by Rosenzweig himself. In his Star of Redemption, he interpreted the purpose of the annual Jewish festivals, the revelation, and salvation—a salvation that could be confirmed and completed by the arrival of the Messiah, but which essentially cannot be overtaken by anything else. In the following, the attempt will be made to characterize in some broad strokes Rosenzweig’s signs of Jewish piety and Jewish behavior toward history, and to juxtapose these to Eugen Rosenstock’s insights on the history of salvation. In doing so, it will probably emerge that the Jewish philosopher of religion also has something to say about time as a quality. Yet this is primarily perceived by the Christian speech-thinker as the “history of salvation.”6 To me, there seems to be good purpose in conducting this comparison of two factual contexts with the help of examples. To this end, I am choosing their mutual statements on Islam as a third form of a monotheistic faith-mindset, and on the Sabbath as a characteristic calendar day of the Jewish experience of time. Naturally, it will be possible only to transmit a first impression of the status of both authors.

1. Islam as a Third Form of a Monotheistic Faith-Mindset In the Star as well as in Soziologie, there are impressive remarks on the religious worlds of India and China. They are noted for two reasons: On the one hand, they allow the uniqueness of the “historical” religions of the West to be appraised; on the other hand, they prove that the religious conceptions of humankind follow an inner logic. Fundamentally, Eugen Rosenstock was right to say in The Christian Future that the West has increasingly and necessarily become preoccupied with these religions of the East, which once seemed so alien. The directives of Lao-tse and Buddha are effectively “antidotes” to the stale morality of the state of Confucius and the besieging wealth of Gestalten in the Veda. They are directed against the diseases of civilization, which not only are part of the past but also confront us anew today. It is part of the practical hygiene of our soul-life that we sharpen our view on religious and philosophical ways of contemplating the world. These religious and philosophical ways are at home—and will continue to sprawl—wherever one is attempting to flee from history. The real, practical action is, as in the case of medical diagnosis, to interrupt the action and to step back for a moment. The most practical action consists of immersing oneself in meditation. Otherwise the greatness of Buddha and Lao-tse, and of Abraham and Jesus, will never be recognized.7

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Rosenstock devoted the first volume of the Soziologie to considering these four “trailblazers” of humanity. Together they form the symbol of the Cross of Reality, which informs his whole view of the world: “Buddha’s flight from the world transcends the competition. Lao-tse’s serenity—or, more specifically, his dissolution—transcends the waves of the people’s will.”8 In the second volume, he dedicates a special chapter to the teachings of the latter, where he speaks of a “trail” that man has occasionally to walk along to reassure himself of his self-chosen main path. Here it is said that the West could and should trust the Tao, since the power of the East is too enormous to withdraw from it completely. To see what he means, we need only to think of the latest measures of Chinese communism that, in pursuit of the economization of man, surpasses everything we have seen from the Soviet-dominated world: I cannot live and die out of Tao; but I thank Tao for the delight in the preliminary, the tolerability of those who labor in serfdom (Frohnenden) … the liberating unhinging from the tenseness of an overbearing workload … Whatever you have to do, Tao teaches you not to haste, teaches you to be as happy when something goes wrong as when something goes right; because only this way will you be able to persevere in your journey.9

Apart from meditation on the crushing nature of external matters and the constraints of human society—that is apart from the exterior and interior alignment of man—there exists the even more pronounced need to recollect on the before and the after of human life, to orient oneself toward past and present, life and death: Abraham and Jesus revealed death within the tensions of the two poles of time. Already through this they prove themselves as fulfillers of time so that they belong together: They can count on each other; together they create eternal life … Abraham donates—in crass contrast to the outerworldliness of Buddha and the internal empire of Lao-tse—a people among the people … In his agony over Isaac, Abraham transcends the fear of not having a future. Jesus transcends the shame of dying, separate from God’s people, in his death on the cross. But he transcends it only through love. He dies into the peoples of the world so that he can pull them toward the one in whom every soul finds peace. To the extent that the past has the old covenant, so is the extent to which the future gains the new one.10

We need to be cognizant of what we have just said in order to appreciate and compare what Rosenzweig and Rosenstock say about Islam. When they compare the religious movements of the West with the East, the former are characterized by the advantage of having a personal

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God and a closer relationship with history—that is, to past and present. The Eastern religions, by contrast, are characterized by their emphasis upon the inside / outside. Whereas the students of Buddha and Lao-tse have been formed through this juxtaposition, it is even more so the case for the West that people have been divergently shaped by their internal participation in the religious processes that are now part of their history. No one can withdraw from the impact of historically accrued characteristics. It is only a human prejudice that there are “unaffected” people. Only that person is capable of speech and of historical reproduction who recognizes himself and others in their historical stamp: And where in one language one person is named by another, there are also traces of the names of the Gods, who rule over the Called and those To Be Called, because only then is the desired recognition transcended; peoples, Jews, Christians are the only real three human pathways in consequence of their calling.11

But what about Islam? It seems to occupy a sort of mid-way position between the historically influenced religions of Judaism and Christianity on the one hand, and the “unhistorical” internally and externally oriented conceptions of the East, on the other. Rosenzweig, in the middle section of his Star, confronted certain key aspects of Islamic piety with those of Jewish conceptions of God, man, and world. He characterized those five passages as statements in his Star that could still somehow be counted as part of a philosophy of religion. While writing the two volumes on Hegel [Hegel und der Staat (Hegel and the State), 1920] and as a consequence of his friendly exchange with Rosenstock, it dawned on Rosenzweig that there was a “danger” in deducing all of reality from a single principle. A new understanding of reality and a new time begin with the Star, where all conventional monistic and dualistic thinking about God and man are laid to rest. The first part of the Star is devoted to proving that for our “natural” or pagan thinking, God, world, and man are separate entities or “substances” that are mutually transcendental. This means that there is no way to draw conclusions about the essence of God and the essence of man by thinking of them along conventional conceptual lines of thought as if they were objects. Descartes’ dualistic teaching of substances, which is the foundation of all conventional idealistic thinking, is thereby just as relativized as Spinoza’s monistic thinking, which was perverted by materialism and now threatens everything human. Only what we call in religious language revelation allows us to understand the essence of God, world, and man as realities that are mutually open. In order to achieve a faithful exploration of reality, one

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needs a new method of thinking that dispenses with a “timeless” gnosis in favor of an encounter occurring in time. This new method of thinking rests on treating true conversation seriously. Thus the method of “speechthinking” that Eugen Rosenstock transmitted to Franz Rosenzweig. In the article of 1925 mentioned above, Franz Rosenzweig repeats that he would not have written his Star without the encounter with Rosenstock. And he goes on to say that he has to thank the latter not only for transcending Hegelian monism, but also for the insight that history cannot be grasped in abstract terms but only through narration. That is why historical information is also always a lively conversation. In that article of 1925, Rosenzweig says: In true conversation something happens. I do not know what the other will say because I do not know what I will say myself … Taking time means not to preclude, to wait for everything, oneself to be dependent on the other. All of this is totally unthinkable to the thinking thinker. But it is fundamental to the speech-thinker. Traditional thinking-thinking and speech-thinking are both forms of thinking. And thinking-thinking always required internal thinking. The difference between the old and the new, logical and grammatical thinking, is not found in loudness or silence but in the fact that the other is required and—this is the same—in taking time seriously. In the new thinking, thinking means not to think or speak for anybody, but speaking means to talk to and think for someone. In this someone, there is always a very particular someone, and has not only ears, as does the general public, but also a mouth.”12

A religion of revelation, such as Judaism, has as its basic characteristic that man allows God to speak to him and that he knows that he has to speak differently as man to man than when he speaks about things. In contrast to Judaism, Rosenzweig characterizes Islam as a “natural” belief in revelation that counts on nothing else but the existence of God who transmitted his will, once and for all, regarding the world and humankind. He did this in a book that is valid forever. Mohammed took on revelation only at first sight; his teaching is a remarkable case of world historical plagiarism. In the basic terminology of creation he remained wedded to the necessity of paganism and he did not recognize the connection between creation and revelation. Paganism is not simply a lie, it is true. But it is true in the most elementary form of truth. It corresponds with the “Euclidean” worlds mentioned so poignantly by Oswald Spengler—worlds in which God, man, and world are untapped and face each other. Man is powerless, a mere plaything of the gods. Therefore, God’s power is, in Islam, not an internal necessity, but arbitrariness. For him, miracles are not fulfillment of predicted events, but

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just inexplicable events. Islam lacks the insight into the inner inversion of the concepts of creation, God, world, and man from complete, mutually exclusive Gestalten or beings into the live springs of revelation. Islam does not know the difference between the original being of the world and the creaturely being that is opened up by reality. That is why it is, in its own context, not about the renewal of life, but about the creation of life in every instance. Here is the root of faith in providence that is so decisive in Islam. Providence in Islam relates not to the world and the fate of humanity generally, but specifically to every single event. Just as on the basis of Islam the creator is conceptualized as a transcendental God not tied to his creation through love, so the work of his revelation is also conceptualized as a single act. The all-encompassing love of Allah lacks a connection to concrete historical activity. Only the personal qualities of the faithful are decisive in proving his mercifulness. In consequence, it is understandable that Islam lacks comprehension of the independence of man, of his “self-defiance.” The “being satisfied with oneself” in it rests on a never-ending cycle of acquittal. As an ethic of performance, Islam is the inheritor of the Stoa, and is simultaneously the precursor of all teaching of virtue that appeared beginning with the Renaissance. It blurs the difference between the needy creature seeking mercy and the soul longing for love. Mercy is not the same as love. True revelation requires, in contrast to mere creation, the I-consciousness (Ichbewußtsein) of man. It is furthermore characteristic of Islam that it regulates the behavior among people primarily through prohibitions. Its only positive commandment relates to “humane” holy war in the interest of the people. Its jurisprudence is based on the teachings of the Qur’an. The life of the Islamic saint appears to be without content, as if oriented according to Kant’s categorical imperative. Islam relies on a constant progress of history and on the successor-interpreter of the founder appearing every century. In this way, Islam is guilty of “poisoning the future” by putting the mere incessant, the unending, process in lieu of a hope of fulfillment.

2. Islam as Theology and as a Sociological Entity of Historical Life Islam is “a Christian sect of the post-Hellenistic world” (Friedrich Heer). Our short sketch of the discovery by Franz Rosenzweig of the basic elements could have elucidated two things. First, Islam transmitted the decisive approaches of the ancient world to modern European thought. Of

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Islam, what Eugen Rosenstock highlights as being characteristic of all of paganism is apposite: The difference of the word that became flesh to the pious pagans is not that they did not love, believe, hope. Nor is it that they were not truly inspired, God-enlightened, nor true hearts come to life. The difference is only that they elevated their own reflection above their speech. For the pagans, theology, philosophy, sociology become the master over speech. The secondary utterances, with which we repeat the divine life, were systematically elevated above the original word that opens one’s own heart to another completely closed heart.13

Second, the “original word,” of which Rosenstock speaks, is held back from the confessor of Islam, because in between him and the living God the strange pseudo-revelation of the Qur’an is somehow introduced. For Eugen Rosenstock, it is decisive that Islam is “monolingual” [Die Europäischen Revolutionen (the European revolutions), 1951, 110].14 The true vitality of the spirit can only unfold where a second, “sacred” language forces a translation into the language of the people and thereby into consciousness. Without this compulsion to transmit the Bible into other languages and points of view of other peoples, the spiritual life of the Christian world would not have the dynamism that takes it beyond the ancient and Islamic worlds. The modern “folly of monolingualism” comes from the canonization by the Arabic world of Arabic as the exclusive language of the Qur’an. Neither Judaism nor Christianity, but Islam, is a religion of the book. By making the book an exclusive privilege, any conversation between God and soul is impeded from being a genuine incarnation. In Islam, Ishmael, the desert son of Abraham, attacked the Gospel. Mohammed does not understand anything about the transformation of the word. He insists on the simple name of God: Allah is Allah.15

And when Islam—through the tradition of Aristotle—contributed to the modern falsehood that there exists a science without preconditions, this is also its failure to appreciate the relationship between God and the soulspeech of man. A science without preconditions is a phantom without essence. But proof of this thesis is that knowledge does not always presuppose identity. For God, incarnation must be presupposed, otherwise we end in the tautology of the Qur’an: Allah Insha’Allah, Allah is Allah, and history will be defrauded of its part in continuing creation.16

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The conversation between Eugen Rosenstock and Franz Rosenzweig is all about the continuing of creation by man in history. At first it has to be considered that in the realm of Islam—in contrast to the religious worlds of the Far East—it came to a truly modern form of historical science. But—in contrast to the biblical-Christian realm—it never came to an effort to grasp the historical context holistically. In Islam, … every age is really immediate to God, and not alone every age, but also and in general everything individual. Thus it is that the soil of Islam nourished the first real historical interest since antiquity, a really and truly scientific interest in the modern sense, without any ulterior “philosophy of history.” In the Christian world, by contrast, the interest in this philosophical background predominated. Its historical exposition was determined by the desire to make God’s sway in history evident to human eyes on the basis of the growth of his kingdom. It is always determined, and will always continue to be, in spite of all the disillusionments by the course of events which again and again teaches that God’s ways are beyond finding out.17

The modern historian who claims to dedicate himself to individual pieces of research, and to forgo a holistic understanding of history is thus a pupil of Mohammed without knowing it. The profound reason for the difference of the biblical Christian understanding of history, vis-à-vis the Islamic or modern pagan one, lies in this deafness to the Gospel as God’s communication with humankind. Its consequence is the lack of an eschatological moment in the writing of history of Islam, as well as of modernity. Because the future will be poisoned at the root if it cannot become the fulfilled moment: For the future is first and foremost a matter of anticipating, that is, the end must be expected at every moment. Only thus does the future become the time of eternity. For just as the tempora in general are mutually distinguished by their relation to the present, so too the present moment obtains the gift of eternity only here: from the past it receives the gift of ever-lasting, of duration, from the present itself that of ever-being. Every moment can be the last. That is what makes it eternal and that, precisely, makes it the origin of the future as a sequence every member of which is anticipated by the first.18

To summarize: Rosenzweig and Rosenstock meet each other in the characterization of Islam as a form of religion that, irrespective of its avowal to a monotheistic form, contains typical traits of paganism. They both claim Islam lacks an understanding of God as a living You in the life

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of the human soul, and therefore in the grasp of history as a process that has its beginning, its middle, and its end. In this regard, both also share the mutual conviction that apart from pagans there are only Jews and Christians. Next to the piousness of the pagan, Islamic, and post-Christian transfiguration of the revelation, or the religion of the original creation, stands the Israelite piousness of insisting on the Messiah or the religion of the hopeful expectation, and the piousness of the Christian experience or the religion of decisive love. Judaism and Christianity bet on the future, albeit in different ways. By leaving his home country—a land of loyalties divided between many antagonistic deities—and waiting for God to fulfill His promise, he testified to his faith in the unity of creation. From that day to this, exile and waiting have been the perpetual function of Israel in human society; with neither country nor national civilization, the Jews have counted the years simply from the creation of the world and waited for the Messiah to restore this world to its original unity.19

What awaiting is for Jews, hoping is for Christians: This creation of Future is a highly costly and difficult process. It can be done but it does not happen by itself. The progress made so far always has been a progress by Christians; especially in the natural sciences, progress is the fruit of Christianity. For Christianity is the embodiment of one single truth through the ages: that death precedes birth, that birth is the fruit of death, and that the soul is precisely this power of transforming an end into a beginning…20

Rosenstock and Rosenzweig have at least superficially different interests in Islam. How then do Eugen Rosenstock’s appraisals of Islam complement Rosenzweig’s characterizations? Rosenzweig’s approach is based upon neo-Kantian philosophy at the turn of the century. It shares its religious-philosophical interest—albeit extending its scope into the study of the human sciences. By contrast, Rosenstock is trained as a sociologist. In a letter of March 1957, he reports that already at the age of 15—at the same age when he became conscious of his innate Christianity—he posited as his life’s work the “essence of human social formations.” Hence he is less interested in the return of the intellectual labor characteristic of Islam than in its enduring social structures. In the astonishing richness of the views that are communicated in his Soziologie, hardly any one is more insightful than he in his remark that there is a close structural relationship between the sects of the Christian church and the tribes, which precede all human foundations of empires and processes of forming nations. “With

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the sects, the modern [human being] usurps more of the attitude toward life of a tribe than with the aid of the pipe dreams of Karl May, or the Wandervogel, or book on pre-history.”21 Islam, however, is a sect of the church and thus a “great memorial to the eternal stream” of the tribes. Mohammed reduced the good news, as if pharaoh, Moses, and Jesus were mere people and not epoch-altering creators and that the tribal chief was still the last high office of the spirit. Islam was able to accomplish this only by claiming that the older messages of Moses and Jesus were God’s word to “other” peoples. Every people has its revelation. In place of the organic growth of the empire of God through the worlds of tribes, empires, and peoples, Islam puts forth a consignment catalogue of unrelated acts of God’s mercy. For Islam, from Adam to Mohammed, there were just only and always the tribes! Each producer of God’s reality was situated, according to Mohammed, in the very same epoch as that of one of the tribes. This enabled Mohammed to become the biggest plagiarist in the history of the world. Abraham and Jesus were put into the dark by claiming that Mohammed was the head of a “different” people and at the same time the last prophet. As head of a “different” people he was accountable to nobody but God. But as the last prophet he could declare his army as the army of all armies. His path of war now became the only path on which this last prophecy would usurp all other older “difference.” Because of his jealousy Mohammed disavowed all other forms of history.22

It is not our task to enumerate the single traits that, according to Rosenstock, characterize the life of the tribes. Suffice it to say that according to his understanding of history, tribal life “predates” all of the actual human “cultural history” of the empires of the early period and the special processes in Israel and Greece. But it does not predate it in the sense that tribal life had been extinguished from the face of the earth through the foundation of the Egyptian, Roman, or Holy Roman empires. On the contrary, Islam teaches us about the power of the times: “Tribal time had run its course in the year 622 of our time. And yet pharaohs had existed at that time for 3500 years.” We skip the insightful discussions of the structural elements that are valid for all original tribes and which were taken up again by Islam and the sects. We content ourselves with the mention that with Mohammed there came to be an exchange of the functions of intoxication and female love. Furthermore, we want to record that it is about the form of a new exodus, about a retreat before Israel and the church, and about a withdrawal from empire and city in tribe and clan: “The era of Islam is based on a flight; this is the truth. And it elucidates the faith of the tribes.” The uniqueness of the Mohammedan calendar is

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understood from the vantage point of this flight. It rests on a count of lunar circulations and disregards the seasonally reappearing festivities of the rest of the world. The historical-sociological achievement of Islam rests upon its ability to bring together approximately one thousand tribes of Asia and Africa into a community of warriors under the sign of this monotheistic faith. Islam as such should not interest us in this context; it should serve only as a medium with which we can call into consciousness some characteristic features of Rosenstock and Rosenzweig. So much should have been illustrated that despite all the congruence between both, there are significant differences in emphasis. Rosenzweig is interested in the theology of Islam because it serves as a template for him to illustrate typical moments of Jewish piousness. Rosenstock, by contrast, is interested in Islam as a sociological entity of historical life. Beyond these differences in emphasis, more becomes apparent: Rosenzweig—regardless of his own reorientation to Judaism—is in the middle of the great discussion that has determined our spiritual life in Europe since time immemorial. This is the discussion about biblical Christian and Greek aspects of our national spiritual life. Therefore, there is little to be expected from him beyond the confrontation of Israel and Greece, regarding our human fate in history as a whole. This is different for Rosenstock. For him, Christ is really at the center of history. Hence his faithful explorer’s will is geared not only toward post-Christian, but also pre-Christian history. And this interest opened his view to the importance of the tribes and the empires, which are older in the history of development than the processes that occurred on the soils of Palestine and Greece. We do not want to lose track of the tribes as the most original form of human “association.” A further comparison of the mutually complementary statements about Sabbath could in a similar way clarify something about the continuing effect of the “empires” in our world and in human orientation.

3. The Imperishability of Judaism, and the Revealed History of Salvation in Christianity This is where at the same time the last significant difference in the point of view of both authors becomes visible. For Rosenzweig, taking stock of Judaism’s self is equivalent to a return to it. He is interested in the historical past that becomes binding for contemporary humans. Redemption rests on making the salvation experienced in the past, present again. Rosenzweig experiences the historically binding as trajective. In contrast,

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Rosenstock’s thoughts—which coincidentally reach all the way back to the early history of humanity—are oriented toward the advancing revelation of salvation in history. Christianity is not about recalling redemption for its own sake, but about enabling the exploration of new paths. Hence, Rosenstock’s view is constantly aimed at the future, regardless of all engagement with history. He is about the faithful lookout for the Präjektivum. For Rosenzweig, Judaism rests on a community of blood whose memories trace back to the promises of Abraham and Moses. “Above the darkness of the future burns the start-strewn heaven of promise: ‘So shall thy seed be’.”23 Many other peoples cling to the soil of home and think that their continuing existence is safe, just as they can assert their own language and their own myths; this is not true for the Jewish people. They have always had to disperse into new landscapes of the world and have had to take on the numerous languages of the host peoples. The uniqueness of their historical tradition, their myth, is linked to this fate. “And while the peoples of the world live in a cycle of revolutions in which their law sheds its old skin over and over, here the Law is supreme, a law that can be forsaken but never changed.”24 Thus it is given that the community of blood of Judaism cannot perish. It seems to be threatened by everything but death: “The people of the world, then, foresee a time when their land with its mountains and rivers will lie beneath the sky as now, but be inhabited by others, a time when their language will be buried in books and their customs and laws stripped of living force. We alone cannot imagine such a time. For we have long ago been robbed of all the things in which the peoples of the world are rooted. For us, land and language, custom and law, have long left the circle of the living, and live in eternity. Our life is no longer meshed with anything outside ourselves. We have struck root in ourselves. We do not root in earth and so we are eternal wanderers, but deeply rooted in our own body and blood. And it is this rooting in ourselves, and in nothing but ourselves, that vouchsafes eternity.25

From the correspondence of the year 1916 we know that Rosenzweig believed it to be impossible that a Jew could really become a Christian. Jewish piousness always rests on a return to Jewish folklore. Here Rosenzweig delivers the justification: In its own interior the Jewish people combine the elements—God, world, and man—in a way that binds together the blurred and contradictory voices of life into the “great fugue of God’s day.” This miracle happens when listening without contradiction to the enunciated passages of the Torah (the law) that occur in the ring of life on the Sabbath.

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In the circle of the weekly portions which, in the course of one year, cover all of the Torah, the spiritual year is paced out, and the paces of this course are the Sabbaths … The Sabbath lends reality to the year. This reality must be re-created week by week … The very regularity in the sequence of the Sabbaths, the very fact that, aside from the variation in the Scripture portions, one Sabbath is just like the other, makes them the cornerstones of the year … In the Sabbath the year is created, and thus the main significance of the Sabbath lies in the symbolic meaning of its liturgy: it is a holiday that commemorates creation.”26

We pass over the description and interpretation of the single acts of the Sabbath festivities: the blessing of bread and wine on Friday evenings, the readings and common meals on the morning and afternoon of the Sabbath, and the happiness at the end of the Sabbath. While the festivity of the preceding evening admonishes creation, the festivities of the main day admonish the chosen-ness of the people and the promise that it was apportioned. From the sanctification of this resting day derives a precursor of redemption: The Sabbath is the feast of creation, but of a creation wrought for the sake of redemption. This feast instituted at the close of creation is creation’s meaning and goal. That is why we do not celebrate the festival of the primordial work of creation on the first day of creation, but on its last, on the seventh day.27

To what extent creation, revelation, and redemption resonate together in the festivity of Sabbath is illustrated by Rosenzweig with reference to the three great pilgrimage feasts of Judaism: the feast of the liberation from Egypt, the feast of the revelation of the ten words, and the feast of tabernacles. They together impart an image of the ability of the people as the carriers of revelation. In particular, the festivity of the tabernacles becomes, as the “feast of the rest of the people,” also the festivity of the highest hope. Ahead of all is the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur or the day of reconciliation, which is rightly called the Sabbath of Sabbaths. The congregation now rises to the feeling of God’s nearness as it sees in memory the Temple service of old, and visualizes especially the moment when the priest, this once in all the year, pronounced the ineffable name of God that was expressed by a circumcision on all other occasions, and the assembled people fell on their knees. And the congregation participates directly in the feeling of God’s nearness when it says the prayer that is bound up with the promise of a future time, “when every knee shall bow to God, when the idols will be utterly cut off, when the world will be

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The aforementioned must suffice to illustrate what Rosenzweig attempts to prove in relation to Jewish piousness: the year as a whole becomes the wholly valid lieutenant of eternity. And so that no premature dedication to the “rush of eternity” occurs, the Day of Reconciliation is situated at the beginning of the festive first half of the year. All of historical memory assembles on the revealed historical events of the beginning; the Jewish myth is paralyzed, but it is therefore withdrawn from the historical process. Hence Rosenzweig can say that in Judaism the people have reached the goal, that its faith precludes eternity and that only in this sense could the future be its driving force. Waiting and wandering is the business of the soul, growth that of the world. It is this very growth that the eternal people denies itself. As a nationality, it has reached the point to which the nations of the world still aspire. Its world has reached the goal. The Jew finds in his people the perfect fusion with a world of his own, and to achieve this fusion himself, he need not sacrifice an iota of his peculiar existence.29

It cannot be put into more stark words, the dramatic core in the conversation among the two friends. Franz Rosenzweig stayed true to his conviction that there cannot be a Jew converted through Christianity. Eugen Rosenstock, in turn, founds the opinion that his friend took on a lot of Christian thinking in his interpretation of Judaism. It is not for to us to examine to what extent Rosenzweig’s understanding of Judaism has remained alive beyond his immediate influence on the Frankfurt teaching seminar from 1920 until 1929. One is tempted to think that it lives on especially in the life-work of Martin Buber. But how strange all these exclamations appear, about making the special character of Judaism

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conscious in light of the foundation of the state of Israel after World War II! Does it not look like a post-hoc exaggeration of völkisch nationalism of the last century, and thus a consequence of the calamitous fall from the old religious traditions? We have to leave these questions unresolved. This is because we are not speaking here of the problematic character of Judaism as such, or even of the problematic character of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. Rather, we are comparing Franz Rosenzweig’s thought— which naturally we cannot separate from his Judaism—with Eugen Rosenstock’s understanding of the whole of human history as a history of salvation, which we can also not separate from his Christianity. For this reason we follow up Rosenzweig’s characterizations of the Jewish year with comparable statements by Rosenstock about Sabbath and Sunday.

4. The Meaning of Israel Eugen Rosenstock knows that there is no Christian understanding of God without the preparatory mission of Judaism, and he also knows that the conversation of God with this people had to preclude the conversation of the individual soul with God in a temporal way: The Jews have in God always prayed to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, always praised the same God as the creator and liberator from Egypt and the sender of the Messiah … God always surrounded them. He always merged several times, the one before their beginning, the one after their end, and the one of today. Through the history of the people of Israel the individual Israelite is inscribed the omnipresence of the blood of Yahweh, even there where his own spirit would fail. The individual Jew would naturally only believe in the living God as seldom as the individual paganChrist (Heidenchrist), would he not have to – in Israel’s unfathomable and miraculous existence – publicly expose himself to the effectiveness of the one and sole God.30

But: To the Christian, the God of the exodus from Egypt, the one who created heaven and earth, must come alive in some other form. If he merely repeats the prayers of the Old Covenant, he could severely misunderstand them, as if there were a Jewish God, a national God of Israel.

What is the essence of the transcendence of Israel’s preceding paganism through the encounters with God, which the Bible conveys?

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This will be illustrated with the aid of Rosenstock’s statements about Sabbath and Sunday. Let us recall that Rosenzweig’s whole argumentation is dominated by the dynamic between Greece and Israel, which dominates traditional thought (überlieferte Denken). Let us also recall that Islam, whose theology is seen as an intellectual endeavor to decipher the relationship between God and man, is particularly important for Rosenzweig. Rosenstock, as we saw earlier, looks at the sociological structures of the Islamic world. He characterizes them as the forces of the soul that are alive in the tribe—the most primordial form of human organization. In the context of the Jewish calendar of festivities this observation of Rosenstock’s is of genuine importance: Israel does not have a celestial list! Just as one is not able to understand Islam as an historical occurrence if one does not consider its origins in tribal life, so one will not be able to honor the Jewish calendar of festivities if one forgets that Israel became what it is through the negation of the empires of the Orient. He who does not distinguish among tribe, empire, and Israel cannot understand a single word of the Bible. The Bible is a scripture of the hieroglyphs of the future, just as the hieroglyphs of the temple are tattoos of the present, and just as the tattoos of the tribes are the death-runes of the past. Past, present, and future were sequentially deified in the ancient world. When it is prayed in church: “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be,” so each and every of these three sentence fragments signify a gratitude for a great nomination in antiquity.31

Eugen Rosenstock dedicated exhaustive research to the life of prehistoric and contemporary tribes, which are only partially included in the second volume of the Soziologie. The same is true of his efforts regarding the essence of the early historical empires, especially the one of Egypt, whose script and language he mastered. It has already been mentioned that he who sees Jesus as the center of history cannot limit his understanding to the last two millennia of the history of salvation, but also has to consider the preparation of the impending salvation in a “preChristian history of salvation.”32 Given his speech-thinking, Eugen Rosenstock concentrates on characterizing the steps of historical development as steps of human speech development. On the level of tribal life—where religion is aimed at nurturing ancestral blood ties in order to preserve life—the name of the carrier of the blood is the most important word of human speech. The coalition of a majority of tribes, seeking safehaven, collectively cultivated large fluvial landscapes and turned its eyes toward the stars: Pharaoh was the link of the celestial family. And he thus

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became the first human who could authoritatively use the first person personal pronoun. On the soil of Israel, the decisive religious experience was the one of the great You of God. While in Greece, indefinite pronouns were developed as aids for discovering human diversity. Without going into further detail, it is nonetheless difficult to grasp what it means that Israel had transcended tribe and empire—the tribe, whose members tattooed the sign of their totem onto their naked skins, and the empires, on whose temple walls hieroglyphs communicate the celestial commandment to their citizens. In the life of the tribes, masked dances serve the invocation of the dead. empires, and on the other hand, attempt to expand the horizons of their celestial skies so as to consolidate life; celestial skies are treated as commensurate with the world. The masks around the dead, and the forts around life were demoted by Abraham and Moses. Together, they both unmasked the adoration of ancestral spirits and the worshiping of the stones. Abraham’s history of the sacrifice of Israel and Moses’ experience with the golden calf show the temptation of him who takes the next big step: If Abraham had sacrificed his first-born son, then only another tribe would have appeared—the tribe of Abraham—but never a people of God. If Moses had forgiven his brother about the golden calf, it would have led only to a bad imitation of Egyptian imperial art. Empires like this exist up to the present day—for example, in Africa. But Moses endowed the monastic hut in the desert; instead of the fertility magic of the empires, the direction of his people rested in the promise of time beyond the peregrination through the desert. And Abraham recognized that the God of Abraham could also be called the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Thus he turned the direction of the spirit away from the ancestor and toward the grandchild. The new love applies to the future. Children and promises hint at the future. In Israel they replace the dead and the animals. In lieu of the interpreters of the stars comes the prophet, and in lieu of the pharaoh comes the messiah, the coming ruler, the one who will orient the present from the past.33

Israel thus became the people of the coming ruler because its members stopped to understand themselves as tribal warriors or as imperial citizens. With the step away from the system of the empires— through the two Exodoi, Abraham’s from Shinar, Moses’ from Egypt—not only did human sacrifices end in Israel but also every form of celestial adoration came to be considered a mortal sin. Eugen Rosenstock places special emphasis on proving that the seven-day week of the Old Testament is older than so-called planetary week that was passed down to us from Babylon via the Greeks. He fights the opinion—publicized widely by the pan-Babylonianism of Hugo Winckler—that the Israelite Sabbath had only

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been taken on by the Jews at the time of the exile. In his opinion, the opposite is the case: The planetary week confronted the Sabbath week of Israel. Through the week that astrologers had arbitrarily collaged with the aid of the sun and the moon on the one hand, and the planets on the other, the pagan world opposed itself to the God of history, Yahweh. The astrological week is younger than Moses’ and opposes it.34

Rosenstock stresses that Israel had to be suspicious of the tribes and empires because of its respect for the seventh day, the day of the Sabbath. In Egypt, all calculation of time had been aligned with the return of the “Great Year” of 1,460 years. This refers to the period of Sothis, which calculates from the moment of the exact match of the disappearance of Orion (= Osiris) on the southern horizon with the arrival on the Nile of the swell at the cataract near Elephantine Island, until the reoccurrence of the same constellation. Rosenstock claims that even the smallest Jew would only muster a laugh about this human enmeshing with the eternal orbit of the stars. The images that the empires, and even Greece, found for the constantly self-revolving natural processes are well known to us: the wheel, for instance, or the snake biting its own tail. But it is just the historical achievement of Israel that it liberated humans from the constraining imagination of the eternal recurrence. For Israel, there is no repetition of historical events; for Israel, history is a unique and nonrecurring process. Therefore, the Israeli week rolls over the division of the year into parts determined by the stars and the position of the sun; and thus the Israeli Sabbath retains its religious meaning: The Sabbath lies with God and not with the stars. On the Sabbath, man exits the world and approaches the creator of the world. And he who cannot do this, or does not do this, forfeits his own likeness to God and becomes a cog in a machine, an Oedipus of psychic compulsion. Most humans are bundles of nerves and are on the treadmill because they do not know that the Sabbath of the Lord transcends the week of labor and of family life … The world is of God’s creation, and as His creations we are devoured in family and work-related endeavors, which are also His creations, for six days. But God is the creator, and once a week we thus step out of the world and over to God.35

Rosenstock shares with his friend Rosenzweig the assessment of Yom Kippur, the highest festivity of Israel, as the Sabbath among Sabbaths: “The work of the six days of the first book of Moses has to be understood in the context of the liturgy of Yom Kippur”36 Thereby he explains that

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two characteristics of the Jewish Day of Reconciliation are especially essential. First, the Sabbath of the Sabbaths of the Jews is not the day of the New Year that had been observed in Egypt and all other empires with special celebrations. For the Jews, the day of the New Year is the first among ten days of repentance, which lead to the beginning of Yom Kippur. And just as characteristic for the distinction with the New Year’s celebrations of the empires is that Yom Kippur itself is a day of repentance: On Yom Kippur every human will collapse unto himself, so that God will be free, first of all, to create his people … On the Day of Reconciliation something happens to the Israelites that is inaccessible to the tribal pride of the tribes. Following the words of Franz Rosenzweig, on the Day of Reconciliation every resolution is shot down, all consecration is deconsecrated; every vow oriented to God breaks. What can we compare with this from our rights? A few legal principles of civil law emanate from the Day of Reconciliation, namely, the one that we cannot be legally responsible for our acts for more than five years. The other, that the worker cannot be hauled into the factory by police coercion. These two legal principles are young … From the Jewish Day of Reconciliation came the two barriers to modern law of an egomaniacal accolade.37

These statements suffice to prove two things: the congruence of both authors in the appreciation of the Jewish Sabbath and the change of perspectives that we have come to know from their statements about Islam. Just as Islam is, for Eugen Rosenstock, in the first instance a specific historical form of organization that emerged out of the life-world of the tribes, Israel is a preferable human “association” that not only left behind the living conditions of the tribe, but also the life conditions of empire. Israel, Rosenstock said this over and over again, is a prayer. It received as a great gift the discovery of God as the great You, the God of which the first sentence of the Bible recognizes that He created both heaven and earth. This means that He is at home neither in the blood of the tribes nor in the light of the stars. And thus it is comprehensible that Rosenstock characterizes the Christian Sunday as a festivity that, in contrast to the Sabbath, is not the last but the first day of the week, but which presupposes in all its luminance the historical preparation by the Sabbath. In the developed planetary week—the contrasting imitation to the Jewish seven-day week—the sixth day is called the day of Saturn. Saturn is seen as the God of the unforeseen fate that places death and ruin onto humans. The Judaism of the times of Christ faced a special dilemma. With the appointment of Herodotus and his progeny, a dynasty had come to

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power that was of foreign, non-Davidian origin. It was out of these conundrums and the confusing prophecies of the clerics that we can explain the emergence of conflicting parties who confronted each other in enmity in Palestine during the time of Jesus, and even after his death. Neither the anti-Roman, national-Jewish zealots, nor the Sadducees who sympathized with the Greeks, nor the Pharisees clinging to the law, were able to see in Jesus the promising Messiah: Thus Jesus became the Saturn of Israel, his day of death the last Sabbath of Israel, because he became the first name of a new eon. This is the meaning of the exclamation by Paul: “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven which is given to men by which we must be saved.”38

Rosenstock clarifies that the Christian Sunday derives its importance from Easter just as much as the Jewish Sabbath does from the Day of Reconciliation: The history of faith of the pagans with the five planets, with Saturn, which brings ruin as a crash, the one of the Jews with their great One Sabbath, the one of the church with its ruinous Holy Saturday and the day of Easter, is only one single history. It is all about the salvation of time, about the moment of truth.39

He who wants to hear Rosenstock’s thoughts on the Christian Sunday in our contemporary world has only to look in The Christian Future, where he dedicated a particularly impressive chapter to it. Anyone who wants to understand the formation of Sunday and its meaning will have to consult the second volume of the Soziologie. In the comprehension of the Christian, Sunday finalizes the conversation that was triggered by the Star of Redemption and which reaches its apex in Der Vollzahl der Zeiten (the full count of the times). Together with it, the Soziologie of Eugen Rosenstock—which was written for the sake of the future—emerges as the Christian response to his friend’s reorientation toward Judaism. Georg Müller (1893 - 1978) was the founding director of the Friedrich von Bodelschwingh-Schule in Bethel, Germany. He also founded the Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy-Gesellschaft in Germany in 1963, and was its first chairman, establishing its archive in Bethel. He edited several works by Rosenstock-Huessy, including Ja und Nein [Yes and No] (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1968) and Das Geheimnis der Universität [The Secret

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of the University] (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1958), and wrote several articles related to Rosenstock-Huessy’s work.

Roland Vogt is Visiting Assistant Professor in the European Studies Programme at the University of Hong Kong. His research areas are SinoEuropean relations, Anglo-German Policy toward China, the phenomenon of political leadership, and summit diplomacy / diplomatic history.

CHAPTER SIX THE DISCOVERY OF THE NEW THINKING THE LEIPZIG CONVERSATION ON RELIGION AND THE CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN EUGEN ROSENSTOCK AND FRANZ ROSENZWEIG ABOUT JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY (1987)

WOLFGANG ULLMANN TRANSLATED BY C. ROLAND VOGT

Editors’ note. This essay originally appeared as “Die Entdeckung des neuen Denkens. Das Leipziger Religionsgespräch und der Briefwechsel über Judentum und Christentum zwischen Eugen Rosenstock. und Franz Rosenzweig,” Stimmstein 2. Jahrbuch der Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy-Gesellschaft e.V., ed. Bas Leenman (Moers: Brendow Verlag, 1988, 147-178; reprint in Wir, die Bürger! auf nach Europa, Deutschland und zu uns selbst! Zivilpolitische Aufsätze, ed. Michael Gormann-Thelen, Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 2002). We are very grateful to Prof. Jakob Ullmann and Esther Ullmann-Goertz for their kind permission in allowing this essay to be published here. Wolfgang Ullmann’s German publisher is Kontext Verlag.

I

1925 EPILOGUE to the Star of Redemption—under the heading “The New Thinking” (Das neue Denken)—Franz Rosenzweig said essentially everything one needs to know about the beginnings of the New Thinking. However, it is not an exaggeration to observe that most of the work still needs to be done, as far as the categorization of this new approach into the philosophical and theological history of our century is concerned. It appears that this situation has two causes: the lack of clarity about Rosenzweig’s relationship with Eugen Rosenstock throughout these beginnings, and the lack of a clear determination of the content of what— following Rosenzweig—is called the New Thinking. Unfortunately, as N HIS

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will be shown below, he himself was not very happy about his own attempts to come up with a terminology to express its contents. We will attempt to clarify the New Thinking by reconstructing the sequence of the conversation on religion that took place in Leipzig on July 7, 1913, among Rosenstock, Rosenzweig, and Rudolf Ehrenberg. This event was very important for the breakthrough of the New Thinking. We will also look at how Rosenstock’s and Rosenzweig’s wartime correspondence relates to this event. In conclusion, we want to suggest which of our results sheds light onto the further development of the two authors. And to preclude potential false expectations from the very beginning: the guiding question will not be the one about the partners’ priority or originality—that is, we will not concern ourselves with biographical questions—but we will focus on factual contents and their historical significance. Naturally, this does not mean that we can abstract from the biographical background. This is already due to the fact that it is one of characteristics of the New Thinking to treat such forms of abstraction as a lack of scientific precision. Following this task it can be appreciated that the New Thinking emerged from dialogue, and therefore, this dialogue needs to take up a corresponding position in the history of religion and philosophy in our age.

1. The Leipzig Conversation on Religion as a Date in the Contemporary History of Religion Among the few philosophical conversations in the history of religion, of which the dialogue between Diotima and Socrates that takes place in Plato’s Symposium is one, the most important would have to be the one between Jacobi and Lessing. For it is here that Lessing’s words are spoken, which characterize a whole period of civic history of religion in Europe: “The orthodox notions of God are no longer for me, I cannot enjoy them. The One and All (Hen kai pan)—I know nothing else.” In a significant passage in Poetry and Truth (Part 3, Book 15), Goethe recorded the event of the appearance of Lessing’s words. In his portrayal of Gretchen and Faust’s discourse on religion, these words became part of the common cultural capital of that period, which we want to characterize with Rosenstock’s concept of faith in philosophy. Faith in philosophy is an expression of the conviction that religion is merely a historically step towards philosophy’s consciousness of the world and reality. This finds its most consistent expression in Hegel’s system. For Hegel, religion is only the second-highest stage of spirit. It can only encompass the penultimate step on the path from the objective to the absolute spirit or mind (Geist).

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But even theology had allowed for the subordinate role of religion, by having presented itself primarily as a science of mediation. This is evident, for example, in Schleiermacher’s thought and his teaching of the “two realms” (Zwei-Reiche-Lehre). In it, the universal discipline of dialectics also comprises theology. Theology is, however, not an element of the system of gnosis, in a strict sense of the word, but only another method for organizing ecclesiastic praxis, which the autonomy of religion has to defend vis-à-vis the speculative claims of philosophy. The significance of the Leipzig conversation on religion among Rosenstock, Rosenzweig, and Rudolf Ehrenberg is that it points, for the first time, to the future of a new epoch in which the equation of God and nature, as it had been determined by the religiosity of the leading social strata, steps into the background with regard to a consciousness of reality. God, man, and world manifest themselves in a whole new way. For philosophy and theology, this meant that they also had to step into a whole relationship to each other. A whole new relationship between theology and philosophy had been established; namely, that of coordination and cooperation. The question of their being in competition with each other, or one being superior to the other, was now rendered meaningless. Anyone who attempts to reconstruct this conversation and its contents is in a more difficult position than anyone who wants to reconstruct the Jacobi-Lessing conversation. There, at least, we can go back to the minutes of one of the participants. In the Leipzig conversation, on the other hand, we only have ex post facto reflections of two of the participants. They have been passed on through their letters, diaries, and subsequent publications. Naturally, over the last two decades, the availability of sources has improved in a number of ways. In 1968 and 1969, autobiographical fragments of Rosenstock appeared under the titles Ja und Nein and Judaism Despite Christianity. Despite being based on partially unconvincing editorial principles, the new Dutch edition of Rosenzweig’s Briefe und Tagebücher considerably improved our sources.1 Two letters of Rosenzweig’s are particularly important: one, the letter of October 13, 1913, to his mother; the other, of October 31, 1913, to Rudolf Ehrenberg. If one surveys the state of the sources, including the state of research as sketched above, there are two desiderata that catch the eye. The part of the third partner of the conversation, the physician and biologist Rudolf Ehrenberg, remains completely shrouded in darkness. It was Ehrenberg, the natural scientist, who was of substantial importance for the theological constellation of the conversation. But we want to turn our attention to the

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other desideratum and ask about the philosophical premises and the philosophical contents of the Leipzig conversation. With this hint at this discussion of Spinozism between Jacobi and Lessing, we intend not only to postulate a yardstick with which we can read the magnitude and importance of the Leipzig conversation. It is also about seeing in Leipzig a counterpart to that epoch in which philosophy saw as one of its main duties the integration of theology and religion into a higher stage of consciousness of the absolute mind / spirit (Geist). The process started with Hegel. It was continued by David Friedrich Strauß, who commenced from the height of this consciousness, only to separate myth and history once and for all, then—together with Feuerbach—he reduced theology to anthropology, and religion to the self-reconciliation of man with nature. In the Leipzig conversation, each of the three friends started from the premises of their own scientific work, and they confronted the following question: Where had this inheritance of Hegel, Strauß, and Feuerbach taken human knowledge? And with that, we have already established our next task.

Position of the participants, course and content of the conversation The conversation took place in the afternoon, in the evening and night of July 7, 1913, at the house of Victor Ehrenberg, the historian and author of many well-known monographs about the history of Hellenism. He was the father of Rudolf Ehrenberg, whose part in the conversation is the least known. But current literature suggests that his role in the Leipzig conversation was apparently much more important than has been realized to date. Rosenzweig stepped into this conversation at a time of personal and philosophical upheaval. He was writing a dissertation on Hegel and he intended to answer questions posed by his supervisor and teacher, Friedrich Meinecke, in Chapter 11 of his 1907 book, Cosmopolitanism and the National State, about the role of Hegel in the history of the idea of the German nation-state. As far as the philosophical is concerned, it was about more than personal incidents. Here it refers to a crisis in the southwestern school of Neo-Kantianism. It was triggered by both Hans Ehrenberg and Rosenzweig, through their setting-up of the Baden-Baden Program. The program was intended to facilitate a philosophy oriented toward the priorities and concerns of the twentieth century. From Rosenzweig himself

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we hear that social ideas, historical world-views, nationalism, and the real conditions of labor should form the content of this program.2 Another aspect of this planned philosophical reorientation is represented in Hans Ehrenberg’s curious text, Die Geschichte des Menschen unserer Zeit, which appeared in 1911. It is a piece of enigmatic philosophical prose, which one could at most understand as an attempt of an anthropology following Nietzsche and as a declaration of war against the then-prevailing Jugendstil of the philosophy of life (Jugendstil der Lebensphilosophie). Actually, it is possible to understand the Baden-Baden Program as a manifesto in the interest of a new objectivity in philosophy. But it was this new tone of objectivity that rallied the opposition of other students of (Friedrich) Meinecke and led to the failure of the Baden-Baden Program, after what was supposed to be a programmatic representation of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. This at least is how Viktor von Weizsäcker reports it in his autobiography.3 The alienation and isolation among the students of Meinecke and (Heinrich) Rickert brought Rosenzweig closer together with the jurist Eugen Rosenstock. Thus he stepped into that circle, which Rosenstock coined as the “Leipzig Eranos” in the preface to his great constitutionalhistorical monograph, Königshaus und Stämme.4 In the face of this constellation, one easily forgets that Rosenstock was the younger of the two friends, and indeed the more successful of the two in his academic career. Back then, he taught as adjunct lecturer in Leipzig and was considered such an expert in medieval constitutional law that even an authority like Rudolf Sohm, in his later work on the Decretum Gratiani, could refer to the young Rosenstock. Rosenstock’s position was far removed from the academic mainstream. That had already became apparent in his study of medieval law of Magdeburg published under the title Ostfalens Rechtsliteratur unter Friedrich II.5 The Baden-Baden Program already stood in clear opposition to the historicism of Meinecke and Rickert in terms of its realism. This was even more the case in terms of his basic conceptions about speech (Sprache) and law.6 He had generalized Savigny’s 1912 thoughts on a grammar of law, emphasizing the consciousness-forming power of law and speech. This in turn enabled him to break away from the typical Renaissance reductions of medieval thought to a static understanding of revelation, which had become such an obstacle to understanding medieval literature. That was the intellectual context from which the two friends stepped into this deeply transformative conversation that night in July. But this does not suffice to explain what happened in that Leipzig discussion. Both

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Rosenzweig, with his new historical concrete realism, and Rosenstock, with his generalized concept of the history of speech (Sprachgeschichte), were enticed to free themselves from the orbit of historicism. A tendency had to be added, a stimulus in the discussion beyond philosophy and history and outside the realm of the religious: the experience of the tragic in history. Under the entry of September 28, 1912, Rosenzweig informs Gertrud Oppenheim that he was working intensively on an idea for a monograph entitled, Der Held. Eine Geschichte der tragischen Individualität in Deutschland seit Lessing (The Hero. A History of Tragic Individuality in Germany, after Lessing).7 His diaries illustrate the importance of this for Rosenzweig’s understanding of history. Rosenzweig attempts to liberate the religiosity of the twentieth century from the nineteenth century. “We emphasize the practical, the fall (Sündenfall), history.”8 The teaching of revelation consequently takes on a dualistic Gestalt: We see God in every ethical occurrence, but not in the completed whole, in history … No, each act becomes sinful, when it enters into history … and therefore God must redeem man, not through history, but really ... as God in religion.9

The impetus for the exploration of such thoughts in the Leipzig conversation was provided by Selma Lagerlöf’s novel, Die Wunder des Antichrist. In particular, what captivated the friends was its ending, where the old pope, in conversation with God, says: “Nobody can free the people of their suffering, but much will be forgiven those who give them hope again to bear their sorrows.” Following Rosenstock’s later report, the conversation ignited, due to the combination of faith and doubt in this sentence. On the one hand, it highlights the necessity of suffering, yet on the other hand the possibility of relief is emphasized.10 Let us remember what the Baden-Baden Program contained in terms of social ideas, historical world-views, nationalism, and real conditions of labor, so that this could make inroads only as a confirmation of that combination of faith and doubt, but never as a counter-example. The first turning point of the conversation was reached when religion, which was missing in the Baden-Baden Program, was problematized. What does it do, vis-à-vis the suffering of the people? Rosenzweig’s answer is in the second volume of his monograph on Hegel. In that book, he illustrates how religion breaks through the “great thoughts of immanence,” citing Heinrich von Treitschke. It therefore allows something like Karl Marx’s world bourgeois society to appear as a mere after-vision of the church, which is not of this world.11

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What does religion cause in history? Following the dualism Rosenzweig espoused at the time, religion intensifies suffering by rendering it tragic, and this has consequences for all the tendencies of the twentieth century, consequences that a philosophy committed to historical realism may not evade. All of this means that the social idea runs into the dilemma between choosing either grand inquisitions or choosing the kind of man represented in the preface to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, someone who merely blinks and is a flea-like inhabitant of the earth (Erdflohmensch). The historical world-view is caught in between two unacceptable possibilities; one of the eternal return of the same, or the Manichaean battle between the empire of light and the empire of darkness. If the idea of nationalism does not allow itself to be transformed into internationalism, it degenerates into racism. Under the conditions of the all-devouring global society, and given the real conditions of labor, nationalism will become either the mere mechanism or irrationalist gesture of absurd refusal. One could already read Rosenstock’s response to Rosenzweig in the introduction to Ostfalens Rechtsliteratur, where contrary to all dualisms, he upholds the indestructible unity of law and speech: “The law was prior to single individuals and their presentations, its history triumphed to become the frame of world history, the history of humankind.”12 According to Rosenzweig’s own testimony, Rosenstock’s refutation of his tragic dualism was the most important moment of the Leipzig conversation. As Rosenzweig himself says: Had I at that time underpinned my dualism of Revelation and World with a metaphysical dualism of God and Devil, then I would have been unassailable. But the first sentence of the Bible prevented me from doing so. This piece of common ground forced me to stand against this dualism. It also remained throughout the following weeks the nonnegotiable point of 13 departure. Every form of relativism of world-views is now off limits.

It deserves to be recorded as something particularly praiseworthy that here the pure theological refusal as far as dualism is concerned gains immediate relevance for the scientific understanding of history. Consider the following: Here, Rosenzweig is not talking of all-too-trite dismissal, so common among academics, of gnostic-theosophic speculation, but of the dualism of God and the devil. Thus we see with singular clarity how the apparently unlimited flexibility of historicism and relativism is underpinned by a latent dualism that becomes patent when confronted by historical reality that it cannot ingest. Unless it is prepared to do what Rosenzweig did—namely, surrender its historical relativistic evasion to

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history. But this is not easy for him, because historicism cannot exist except by living off its subjectivity from its corresponding objectivity, regardless of whether it is juxtaposed as spirit / mind or history or culture of nature, or as creativity of causality, or as understanding to explanation. And the moment in the Leipzig conversation, which was recorded by Rosenzweig in such clear words, describes exactly the instance in which historicism, if it wants to insist on its subjectivity, confronted with the unity of reality—also as unity of past and present—either follows Nietzsche and proclaims the eternal recurrence of the same, or transcends to the ontological dualism of two rival powers or worlds. But to avoid this state of inertia, it is necessary to take a theological decision, the one of deference to the first sentence of the Bible. And as we had to learn, in the meantime, this deference is a more effective way of excluding the intrusion of the dualistic myth from emerging than all the familiar lipservice to scientific stringency and the historical-critical method. We know what it looked like when others apart from Rosenzweig were forced to take different decisions. At that point, one followed Carl Schmitt and resorted to friend and foe as the fundamental categories of politics. NeoProtestantism rendered meaningless the Old Testament for the church, while the order of the day for liberal historiography was the criminalization of the Russian October Revolution. Whence came Rosenstock’s aforementioned irrefutable proposition that forced Rosenzweig to affirm the Christian-Jewish faith in creation? The frequently cited sentence that Rosenstock had declared during the conversation—that if his partner in dialogue persisted in his position, then he would just go to church and prostrate himself in prayer—does not amount to a sufficient explanation of his position. Such action could have been interpreted as a tragic act of religiosity, as had been characteristic of Rosenzweig even in the run-up to the Leipzig conversation. But Rosenzweig also tells us that it was not simply Rosenstock’s position but it was Rosenstock’s very existence that forced Rosenzweig to abandon historicism. “Therefore, at that time I was disarmed with one strike also because of Rosenstock’s repeated deference, with which his attack only began. That a man like Rosenzweig was in full conscience a Christian … this confused my entire idea of Christianity, but also of religion generally and thereby also of my own religion.”14 Rosenzweig does not just simply leave what occurred at that time in the realm of interpersonal influence. Vis-à-vis Rudolf Ehrenberg, he grasps the incident theologically, as he notes that he had post-dated the Epistle to the Hebrews, not exactly for eighteen centuries, but for

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centuries, and thus had engrafted the Epistle to the Hebrews onto the living branch of Judaism in the twentieth century. Thus Rosenzweig also explored the position on which Rosenstock opposed him and rendered impossible his continuation of the path he had followed to date. He positioned himself against Rosenstock as a Jewish Christian (Judenchrist), meaning as a Christian whose pre-Christian stage was no longer the Greco-Roman culture of Europe, but the unity of human history that is visible so far only in the Gestalt of Israel. A transformation of the antiquities had occurred within Rosenstock. In place of the classicistic antiquity came the antiquity of Israel and thereby he had gained the authority and authorization to ask again like Tertullian: Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis, quid academiae et ecclesiae (What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?).15 Here, suddenly faith, in the sense of 1 Corinthians 1, steps into the light, which is no longer trying to prove and defend its compatibility with Hellenistic wisdom.16 Instead, it is indeed a faith—that is to say, culturally it is an act of folly, a religious scandal, which is exactly what the Gospel says in the passage where it equates folly with scandal. Through his scholarship, Rosenstock proved that his positions were not based on a form of revelation that only expressed positivistic authoritarian fundamentalism. Had it been only thus, he would hardly have been able to revolutionize Rosenzweig’s idea of religion on a scientific level. How do we, from our contemporary perspective, theologically assess the Rosenstockian position of 1913? In light of the decisive role of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the context of the Leipzig conversation, we would need to know the contributions of Rudolf Ehrenberg. He was a physician and physiologist who was working at that time on an interpretation of Hebrews 10:25.17 Nowadays, we can only draw on Rosenzweig’s utterances in his retrospective letter to this friend. From this letter it emerges that Rosenzweig projected Paul’s parable of the olive tree from Romans 11 onto the Epistle of the Hebrews as a whole. Just as the Christians are rooted in Israel, so is Rosenstock’s Christianity of the Epistle of the Hebrews rooted in the contemporary life of Israel. I believe Rosenzweig wants to say the following: Where Paul teaches a unity of Jews and heroes, with Christ as purpose of the whole growth of the olive tree in mind, the Epistle to the Hebrews induces us to see in the act of incarnation, which happened in Abraham’s offspring, the embodiment of what is indissoluble in humankind. Hebrews 10:25, which was interpreted by Rudolf Ehrenberg, then becomes a warning not to abandon the

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synagogue of humanity donated by Christ. Because in light of the eschaton, such abandonment must have catastrophic consequences for individuals and humanity as a whole. This makes the Leipzig conversation an event in the history of religion. He, who in the full indulgence of an idealist inheritance and who was convinced, in an unbreakable faith in philosophy, to have adopted a position of tragic classicist religiosity beyond Judaism and Christianity, comes up against a Judeo-Christianity that not only points to an end to Christian assimilation of Renaissance humanism, but also a type of scientific work that has opened up new land. That new land lies far beyond what was known to university-trained minds whose thoughts were formed by theologians and philosophers from the twelfth century. And even though only three scientists, all non-theologians and nonphilosophers, were part of this conversation, this conversation was still a first step towards an ecumenism of humankind in which the Gospel had become provocative as folly and scandal. Through this, the conversation had distanced itself from all attempts—even the most recent ones—to defuse the explosiveness of a slowly nurtured situation, by proving Hellenism to be folly and the scandal of the cross to be a misunderstanding. As we are going to see below, Rosenzweig had been confronted through the Leipzig conversation with the following question: Must I myself not defer to the presence of Judaism as the greatest of all scandals in the post-Hellenic world of the twentieth century?

Rosenzweig’s renewal of the deferring to Judaism as a consequence of the Leipzig conversation For Rosenzweig, what distinguishes this conversation from other types of pious and inspiring narratives of proselytizing, is the fact that he can only frame the experience of this conversation with the term “breakdown” (Zusammenbruch). “Something happened to me in the year 1913 that I, if I may speak of it, cannot identify in any form other than with the term breakdown.”18 Let us record at this juncture how, long before the eruption of World War I, the experience of a breakdown had already become a fact of life for Rosenzweig. We will, in our last part of our explorations, have to address which antithesis opened up vis-à-vis Spengler and the whole post-1918 theological and non-theological literature of crisis. But what exactly does Rosenzweig mean when he talks about breakdown in the context of Leipzig? In a later letter to Rosenstock, he explained it in the following terms:

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… thereby you legitimately forced me in Leipzig in 1913, when you steadfastly did not believe me, when you did not let one utterance of mine count as mine, until I myself became frightened about how putrefied my flesh and how sluggish my blood was; then I proceeded toward examining the bones.”19

As we can extract from other pertinent letters, we have no reason to question the seriousness of this examination in any way or to understand it in a belittling way. Rosenzweig was even able occasionally to refer to this time as one of a disposition toward death. Seen from the outside, this time was filled with negotiations and preparations for his christening. That it did not come to this is due only to theological reasons, as we will soon see. The extent of his ignorance was evident to Rosenzweig, and it confronted him in the form of a liberal Protestant minister. While Rosenzweig’s letter to his mother does not talk about this ignorance without sharpness and bitterness, this was not in any way decisive for his decision to remain a Jew.20 Rosenzweig notifies Rudolf Ehrenberg on October 31, 1913, of his decision with the following words: I must tell you what will concern you and, at least for the time being, what will be incomprehensible to you: Through long and exhaustive deliberations, I made up my mind to retract my decision. It no longer seems necessary to me and is therefore in my case no longer possible. I will thus remain a Jew.21

What follows in this letter is a profound exploration in which everything that is taught in the Star of Redemption is already basically present. Rosenzweig writes not only for his own justification, but, as he himself says, because he also demands from the Christian the theoretical recognition of his decision. This was even more so as Rosenzweig legitimizes his position with the verse of the Gospel of John: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”22 Rosenzweig explicitly recognizes this word of Christ and its exclusivity. But he interprets it in a very unexpected manner: It only comes to the Father—but in a different way, when somebody does not have to come to the Father because he is already there. And this now is the case of the people of Israel (but not of the individual Jew). The people of Israel, chosen by their Father, glance rigidly across the world and history onto the last, furthermost point, where this will be his Father, he himself, the one and only—all in all.23

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We therefore see that Rosenzweig presupposes the validity of this logos in John. What is being proclaimed here is not a relativist teaching of two paths of salvation. Instead it is about recognizing the form of existence of worldlessness in God the Father as the mission of Judaism, whereas the Church—and from the Jewish point of view legitimately— goes into the world by proselytizing, criss-crosses the world by proselytizing, and lives in it by proselytizing. Therefore, the community of Christian and Jew is the symbol of the eschatological dimension of history. By linking 1 Corinthians 15:27 and Romans 11:25, Rosenzweig does not have to justify the community of Christians and Jews on the basis of a rationalist critique of christological and trinitarian dogma.24 But he can rightly espouse that the regnum Christi is not identified with the Kingdom of God in a modalistic way and is thereby relieved of its eschatological dimension. The theological significance of this position is documented by Rosenzweig’s ability to formulate in his 1914 essay, “Atheistic Theology,” the main future task of all, even of Christian theology after 1918. … will it be possible to move the concept of historical / supra-historical revelation into the center of human knowledge? At the current time, the scholarly awareness of Protestantism faces this decision, from this vantage point will the battles of the near future erupt.25

With the concept of atheistic theology, Rosenzweig intends almost the opposite from what all the buzzwords of the 1960s seemed to favor. For Rosenzweig, atheistic theology makes theology a constituent part of religious self-interpretation of humanity and its society. It seeks to eliminate the tension of the question of revelation. It does so either in a collectivist or individualist manner. Because of this, Rosenzweig saw it as his task to move the concept of revelation into the center of knowledge. He decided not to keep theology separate from knowledge by way of the concept of revelation. What this would entail for his life and labor became the substance of a new dialogue between Rosenstock and Rosenzweig that was conducted—due to the circumstances of the war—through letters.

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2. The Experience of Confrontation of Jew and Christian in Light of the Speech of the One Revelation Post Hegel mortuum: The discovery of the boundary of validity of the idealist’s justification of systems Since 1933 the topical nature of the Jewish question has led to the fact that the correspondence between Rosenstock and Rosenzweig, between May and December 1916, would be interpreted as a kind of predecessor to the post-Auschwitz discussion, and would be interpreted one-sidedly in a religious-philosophical or dialogical-theological manner. In contrast, it should be underlined what the interpretation of the Leipzig conversation had achieved. Dialogue and disputation of the two scholars are initiated by the common confrontation with a fact, which both of them had discovered: the power of speech of God’s revelation that instilled knowledge and founded reason. It is factually and historically equally important to consider the following: the Jewish-Christian dialogue has a root independent of national-socialist racism. The attempted genocide must not get credit for making us evidently aware of the necessity for this dialogue. The fact that the war correspondence between Rosenstock and Rosenzweig was motivated by a question of philosophical foundational research remained in complete obscurity due to the dominance of the problematic of racism. In fact, the correspondence was formally prompted by Rosenstock’s discovery of Schelling’s 1796 program of systems, developed while working on his dissertation at Hegel’s estate in Berlin. Throughout Rosenstock’s home leave in 1916, he had read a long paper [by Rosenzweig] about this discovery of Schelling’s. This motivated him to open the correspondence, which would last well into December, with the following notification: “… after I read your essay on Schelling, I am, without any scholarly provisos, for the first time, all yours.”26 A few lines down, he specified this approval with further substance. Rosenstock thanks Rosenzweig for having illustrated to him the revolution of 17891900 in a way that elucidated to him exactly the epoch that ended with the outbreak of World War I. Incidentally, the discovery of Schelling’s program of systems of 1796 was not a reclassification, but rather a re-dating and a transformation and re-definition of the contents of the idealist history of systems. Even when the common consciousness barely reflects on this, the priority of Schelling over Hegel has long been known, and even Hegel explicitly acknowledged it in his history of philosophy. However, the text identified by Rosenstock

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cast a whole new light onto the revolutionary character of the system of idealist thought and subsequently its role in the period after 1789. Schelling’s “systems program” makes it once and for all impossible to misinterpret the famous phrase of Friedrich Schlegel—that Fichte’s teaching on science embodies the three main tendencies of modern times (Neuzeit)—in the sense that it cannot be anything else but the translation of revolution into philosophy, and therefore its political defusing. What Schelling wrote in 1796 was nothing else but the continuation of revolution on the terrain of ethics and religion. The sketch of the system begins with the motto to replace all metaphysics and ontology with an ethic of absolute freedom. This ethic in turn has, according to Schelling, subordinated itself to the whole of natural philosophy using the thought of speculative physics. In this way it becomes possible, in the relationship between man and nature, to restrain all historical tradition with the battle slogan “beyond the state” (“Hinaus über den Staat”), a slogan that anticipates the ensuing anarchism of the nineteenth century.27 And what Nietzsche will declare to be the most important result in the last phase of his work—even that is contained in Schelling’s systems program, when it states that the highest act of reason is the aesthetic one. At this stage, the systems program of Schelling passes over into religion, as it demands the religion of the future become a mythology of reason, a teaching of world-determining powers.28 Rosenzweig is certainly right when he declares it to be essential for the interpretation of the whole, that the program, which rolls out its philosophy here, understands itself as a philosophy of the spirit. He thereby calls upon duty as a central and concluding concept, one that would later be of crucial importance for Hegel’s realization of the whole. As the context of the correspondence shows, the reasons for Rosenstock’s approval of Rosenzweig’s interpretation of idealist systematics (Systematik) are found here. According to Rosenzweig, the systematic thought formulated here is insurmountable, even unsurpassable— namely, as an idea of the complete integration of truth and reality. Its task is to concentrate all thought so as to grasp and express reality as it is. A program such as this was inconceivable, in this form, in ancient times or medieval times.29 When Hegel realized this program in the form of the dialectic method, he had only just drawn the last consequences of Schelling’s prioritization of absolute freedom. Likewise, when Hegel’s political ethic is still seen to follow the laws of deductive logic, he thereby unleashed unintended consequences from Altenstein to Lenin.

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Conversely, in the twentieth century, the limits of validity of such a system also resulted from its fundamental character. As we know, Rosenzweig saw the twentieth century as being determined by technology, multiple forms of statehood, multiple languages, nationalism, and socialism. Yet all of these have their roots beyond the system that culminates in Hegel. Rosenstock verifies this insight from another point of view. After his preoccupation with Schelling’s Weltalter and with Hegel’s Phenomenology, he writes to Rosenzweig that both works had impressed him as instances of advances in our grasp of historical reality. But just as evident was how both failed, due to the instruments of an inadequate terminology.30 For the same reason, no return to Kant would be possible. According to Rosenstock’s studies of the three critiques, he came to the conclusion that Kant’s philosophizing was, on the one hand, pre-systemic, and on the other hand his logic was already substantive metaphysics without giving himself methodological accountability.31 Rosenstock draws another important consequence from the Rosenzweigian treatise on Schelling. It also marks the final point of any form of neo-romantics. This is because the program of 1796 is also behind the athenaeum of the Schlegel brothers and of their friends.32 If no alternative to the idealist systems program can be found here, then it is also not possible to see a “re-pristination” of romantic modernisms as a historical possibility for present times. The alternating playing off of classicism and romanticism so typical for German “Geistesgeschichte”— here the dubious word is in order—reveals itself as a self-deception for both sides. Both classicists and romanticists were caught up in the selfdeception about the fact that both have the same roots in the chiliastic consciousness of 1800. This was expressed in Novalis’ Christianity or Europe, but even more clearly, in Schelling’s systems program. The two correspondents of 1916 exchanged opinions about the consequences which they would draw from the aporia of the idealist systematic. Here, it was all about much more than a purely internal matter of philosophy. The system of idealism was the last philosophical system whose dynamics had contributed to laying new foundations for universities and the organization of the sciences. Rosenzweig thought that the time had come to place the whole of public education on new foundations, as he had then developed in his proposal, Volksschule und Reichsschule.33 Rosenstock, by contrast, is more interested in not relinquishing the idea of a complete correlation of truth and reality for the sake of the anarchy of professorial and non-professorial private philosophy. Rather, his thought attempts to correlate space and time through what Rosenzweig

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calls calendar philosophizing.34 His thinking detects the different dimensions of time and correlates the natural calendar, the biographical calendar, the calendar of humanity, and the calendar of the church with each other. In this way he creates for himself a new task. How can these calendars be organized so that this leads to a meaningful polyphony, and not boundless pluralism?

Revelation as illumination and orientation to the Cross of Reality In the context of organizing these calendars, Rosenstock uses a basic formula of his latter Soziologie when he speaks of the “cross of reality.”35 The theological theme of the Leipzig conversation is thus continued in an indistinguishable manner. This corresponds to the second cause of their correspondence. Rudolf Ehrenberg had come to Kassel, where Rosenstock stayed for part of his holiday in Rosenzweig’s parental home. From Ehrenberg he heard that Rosenzweig’s decision to live as an avowed and practicing Jew was irrevocable. Among the Leipzig circle of friends, one had started from the premise that the consequence of the conversation of July 7, 1913, could only be Rosenzweig’s christening. But his decision in favor of Judaism was not the cause of the ensuing distance between Rosenzweig and Rosenstock, which only ended with their correspondence in May 1916. Rosenzweig himself interpreted the distance, which had occurred in Leipzig, in a different way. In his eyes, it derived from the difficulty of placing the Rosenstock of the religious conversation in a relationship with the Rosenstock who was still a university teacher. Rosenzweig openly agrees that he was unable to accomplish this. Rosenstock had now taken the initiative. But initiative for what? To answer the question whether to become a Jew, post Christum natum, would not necessarily be an expression of Jewish obduracy vis-à-vis Christ. The uniqueness of this conversation through letters consists of the question whether one succumbs to the replacement of inter-religious niceties with all their trivialities, or whether one declares that the limits of the possibilities for communication have been achieved. Rosenzweig does neither the one nor the other. Rather, he answers the question about his decision, and its possible identity with Jewish obduracy, with a clear “yes.” He is able to do so because he is sure that he will not to succumb to defiance and self-assertion. The psychology of the battle for his own identity and for self-realization had been left behind in exactly that conversation of religion, in which a whole new chapter of the

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common history of Christians and Jews had been opened. The topic of this new chapter was the sudden clarity about the realization that it was the unity of God’s revelation, which accounts for the two not only different, but also contrasting, Christian and Jewish ways of existence and paths of life. Rosenzweig reports how he realized, when reading the writings of Tertullian against Marcion, that it was not the dogma of the councils of the fourth to the eighth centuries, but the agnostic avowal of the first and second centuries, which makes up the substantive content of the Christian dogma that calls—in Christ—the son of the creator as God. And who dares to design, from this vantage point, the breathtaking perspective of concord between the Christian and Jewish history of dogmas. Rosenzweig thinks that this combination can be intellectualized through and through. This cannot be done on the basis of the historical relativizing of dogmas, but—by contrast—on the basis of the certainty of “the great victorious eruption of the spirit into the ‘un-spirit,’ what one calls revelation.”36 If this is the case, then one has to demonstrate how this unity of revelation is supposed to be understood in the here and now. This demonstration needs to occur in light of the contemporary and personal relationships between Jew and Christian (and this without falling into the embarrassing tone of avowal of private religiosity), and in light of a new application of Anselm’s “remoto Christo.” Rosenzweig’s precise question can thus only be the following: “Explain to me your contemporary concept of the relationship between nature and revelation.”37 And not without reason did he link this question to the other, more profound question: “Does speech no longer have the importance that it once had for you? Can you no longer express everything you believe, when you speak of speech?”38 This is the meaning of the post-Anselmian “Christo remoto”: to describe revelation in such a way that it becomes recognizable as the fundamental precondition and most universal horizon of human communication. Rosenstock would have been the last one who should have evaded this question. He himself had mentioned to Rosenzweig: “Day after day, for me the revelation of God in the world has moved from being a merely secondary abstract concept to an ever more immediate here-and-now reality.”39 This had been said in the initial euphoria of the communication in the letter. Now, however, Rosenstock faced the seriousness, the Jewish seriousness of the determined inquiry. How did he react to this? Rosenstock answers twice throughout the whole correspondence. Both answers are based on John 1:14 and both answers contain the same

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truth—of which Rosenzweig declares one year later—that they had been decisive for his thinking.40 In the first answer, Rosenstock claims: Revelation is a change of perspectives. It is a passage from the frog-like perspective of one’s own actions—which, following Faust, re-interprets the first sentence of the Gospel of John to the assertion, “In the beginning, there was the deed”—to a recognition of an Above and Beyond of one’s own actions. This is a process akin to a form of self-elevation in a new dimension, from the plane into space. Yet the real and more important answer, which directly deals with Rosenzweig’s question, is: “Nature and revelation: the same substance, but exposure in inverse.”41 Revelation is not an addition to nature, like an additional piece of information about something lying beyond nature. No, revelation is orientation in nature, orientation in the holistic reality through the illumination of its contents and scope, orientation through the illumination of the right and left, the front and back, the above and below beyond one’s own existence. Such a change of perspectives is not a matter of human-natural reason. It cannot be such a thing, because how should human reason solve the question of not treating one’s position as the center and yardstick for assessing everything else? From where should human reason take the strength to solve this question? Rosenstock explains this in the form of a delimitation from Schleiermacher’s feeling of an unconditional dependence.42 In contrast to being overpowered by an all-encompassing and encircling exterior, Rosenstock drew upon the same illumination that was behind Schleiermacher’s universe to create his “cross of reality.” This illumination enables recognition of real space through real time, a time that is not a form of the inner sense (Kant), but is a dimension of change for which there is only a single measurement—namely, time. According to Rosenstock, timelessness in thinking is only a symptom of the abstraction of language. It is an abstraction that always has to remain incomplete. Because even concepts and terminology are still language—language in a frozen state of aggregation—but not spoken language in a higher sense of being. In this sense, John 1:14 is also a soteriological statement, that incarnation—and only incarnation itself—liberates our consciousness from the absoluteness of an impenetrable identity, a tautology of its selfreflection: “Here the teaching of the logos of the savior sets in. The logos is liberated from itself, from the curse to only amend itself in itself. The logos establishes a link with the known. The word becomes flesh— everything is dependent on this phrase.”43

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It is this liberation of speech that allows faith, in the Jewish-Christian tradition, to become a meta-religious reality. The experience of the cross as the whole of reality rests on faith, which has found the Archimedean point outside itself. It is this faith that, according to Jesus’ word, already in the size of a mustard seed possesses the power to move mountains. Rosenstock expresses it in the following terms: Faith is an asset that only lives within those who are morally healthy, which can break and dissolve because of impurity, and which is feasibly comparable to other forces of nature. Christ conveyed to us the transcendence of this bundled, latent force on earth onto the space of heaven. Where before there was only Abraham’s lap, there is now living eternity and the ascendance of spirits from star to star. The revelation signifies the linkage of our consciousness with the contexts of world and heaven which reach beyond Earth.44

After six decades, it is more than timely to honor the historical significance of what had been explored in the conversation between Rosenstock and Rosenzweig. The concept of revelation, as is represented here, is significant in three ways: It provides a new (but by no means complete) answer to Kant’s question: What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking? According to Rosenstock and Rosenzweig, to orient oneself in thinking means to orient oneself to oneself, and thereby to remain wedded to an unclear relationship between real space and real time. Both Rosenstock and Rosenzweig call for the orientation of thinking to speech. In particular, Rosenstock’s concept of revelation posits an alternative to Lessing, Hegel, and Kierkegaard’s dilemma of revelation and history. In either rational, supranatural, or mediating-symbolic ways, contemporary theology struggles with this dilemma. Rosenstock revitalizes what Hamann had already encouraged vis-à-vis Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Kant: to expand the concept of history in such a way, that the futile confrontations or identifications of revelation and history, and revelation as history, will once and for all become invalid, when the event of Christ itself becomes the measure of history and its calculation of time.45 This, however, presupposes a concept of incarnation that understands revelation and incarnation as a unit. Incarnation is no longer the fabulous beginning of the life of Jesus, as is posited in the old council dogmas and the ecclesiastical tradition based on it. Rather, it is an expression of the character of revelation of his whole life as Christ, his promised birth, his prophetic teaching and actions, his cross, his revival, his ascendance, that—all in their own ways—manifest God’s logos.

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Where in this world context and heavenly context of revelation and incarnation is there a place for the Jews? It was this question that had led Rosenzweig’s friends to assume that he would—after the confrontation with the revelation of Christ—become a Christian like them. After all, to what can a Jew convert but to Jesus Christ? But Rosenzweig did not do so. Rosenstock declared explicitly that he respected his decision.46 But we already know what reason was behind this. Behind it was all the conviction about the obduracy of the Jews as a Christian dogma, the negative evidence of their participation in the events of revelation. Therefore, the individual possibility of obduracy on an historical reality embodies the synagogue as the image of revelation-less repetition, a futureless vitality which will indeed continue until the Second Coming, but which nonetheless continues in the same position.47 By contrast, the church is even in its most alien forms a living creature. It lives beyond all nations and national borders, it is the origin of a new unity, and ends in individualization only in the Second Coming, a wholly different rebirth of the same, as was the eternal recurrence so feared by Nietzsche.48 Seen from this point of view of revelationdetermined history, Rosenstock’s bold greeting to Rosenzweig can also be explained: “Dear co-Jew, post Christuum natum, post Hegel mortuum.”49 The indelible community of Jew and Christian in revelation-oriented reality: How does the Jew react to such friendly Christian “rabies theologica”? He does not contradict it, but affirms it, albeit from his own position. This is because he has a counter-question to ask against the one, whether the Jew has anybody else but Christ to convert to. The Jew, by contrast, asks: Can a man—even Christ—convert to anybody else but God? Rosenzweig can accept everything that Rosenstock says about the synagogue. Blindfolded and with a broken wand, this is how the synagogue stands next to God, whom the pagan approaches through Christ. Therefore, the following sentence is valid: “You will not get rid of us … We are the internal enemy—do not confuse us with the external one.”50 In this confusion, Rosenzweig sees Rosenstock’s main theological problem. He speaks about the Jews as if they were pagans. Rosenzweig reminds him that poverty, discipline, the synagogue’s lack of revelation (Offenbarungslosigkeit) are all consequences of having taken on the yoke of the heavenly kingdom. Thus, they live that eschatological existence, with which—just as the Persian courtier did with Herodotus—they constantly remind the church: “Despota, memneso on eschaton.”51 For the same reason, Rosenzweig criticizes Rosenstock’s comparison of Abraham

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and Agamemnon. Unlike Agamemnon, Abraham does not sacrifice a child, but all promised futures, just as the synagogue sacrifices everything but its naked being. In doing so, Rosenzweig naturally provokes the reciprocal allegation by Rosenstock. He, in turn, confuses the church with the world of nations. Because when the latter elevates itself—through nationalism—to a program, the result is not, as Rosenzweig believes, “ethnism”—the freedom of the historical life of nations—but imperialism. This imperialism follows from a tradition of the Roman Empire—conveyed by and through the church—with which the church has often been associated, but which in historical reality it has never been identical to.52 The discussion of these arguments leads to long and rich explorations of both Rosenstock and Rosenzweig about the existing or non-existing contentidentity of Jewish and Christian piety. In this case it was Rosenzweig who says the definitive: “Only for Jews and Christians does there exist this fixed orientation of the world in space and time, there is a real world and a real history, there is North and South, past and future which are not of God (this is easily said—in the Qur’an and translated into the East-West divan) but which became of God, should become of God, and therefore also are.53 We reiterate again: Rosenzweig does not contradict when Rosenstock presents his thinking about the revelation of God through the incarnation in Jesus Christ. Also, he is deeply convinced that when the revelation of God in itself has nothing else as content, there can be only one revelation and thus only one path to salvation. All differences and antagonisms among Jews and Christians result from the historical reality of this revelation and the eschatological character of their world-orientation to the cross. This binds them together and divides them at the same time. In this way, it is also constituted that the confrontation and community of Jew and Christian only break down, when either the one or the other denies his faith. The wording of the revelation will always facilitate its faith to remain wedded to the rich and contrasting transformational power of speech in which it is engaged: “Only the Jew and the Christian—no one else—can say I and You, and thus link the I and the You through Having (Haben).”54

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3. The Linguistic and Structural System of Correlation of Truth and Reality in the New Thinking Classification in the history of philosophy and theology According to traditional historiography in the Humanities, the Leipzig conversation and the 1916 correspondence are beyond the main twentiethcentury currents of philosophical and theological thinking. According to mainstream opinion, twentieth-century philosophy and theology are determined by the renunciation of all metaphysics, which divides itself into the two main branches that reject systematic thinking: existentialist and logic-empiricist positivism. Corresponding to this is, on the theological side, the common distance of liberal and dialectical theology from the tradition of the church. In fact, neither Rosenstock nor Rosenzweig can be attributed to one camp or the other, and both stand isolated, each in their own way. But when we apply their own yardsticks of historical judgment, by asking how much historical reality informed their thinking, different results emerge. If anybody, it was them who recognized the unique role of the Jewish question in the twentieth century. Rosenzweig expressed this clearly in a letter, written in the wake of the Leipzig conversation and the encounter with a well-meaning Protestant pastor: From the Christian point of view (excuse me, Reverend, but it is only this we care about in a Christian; how the thing looks like from a Jewish perspective, we already know), so, from a Christian point of view, it [Judaism] is also not dead. Proof: … the Christians use the Old Testament, and Reverend J., in accordance with new science, recognizes in the prophets evidence of a pure and strong monotheism. This is a vitality which we had in common with the old Athenians, whose dramas are still in school curricula today and which still excite Mr. Principal Bunke from Dräs’en. Or an immortality, as enjoyed by the great Alexander, who— “having become dust and clay”—now may plug “a hole in the high north.” So much honor, Reverend! But us all-too-ambitious Jews do not want to be satisfied with so much honor and instead of being pleased “to paste up a wall before a storm,” we tell ourselves that the world should even today “quake” in front of us. The skull, above which you, with your church, call a melancholic-ingenious “Alas poor Yorick,” still thinks of itself as being alive and believes to get the entire literary coterie (still wanting to have a word) to cry—which tentatively only laughs at him, but nonetheless shows him that he is still more alive.55

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Rosenzweig’s 1916 program for schools—Volksschule und Reichsschule—shows what it demands in terms of a philosophical engagement with mathematics, an historical education not confined to the national horizon, and a fundamental ability to speak multiple languages at the secondary school level.56 The program shows such eminent clarity about the character of our times that we have to recognize—in the ineffectiveness of this thinking—the reasons of an apparent helplessness of our society vis-à-vis today’s demands. We can also express this assessment differently. Like many contemporaries, Rosenstock and Rosenzweig criticize idealistic systematic thinking. Unlike them, however, Rosenstock and Rosenzweig do not intend to discredit the whole of systematic thinking as such. They do not reprimand the great idealists for having conceived of systems so as to grasp the unity of reality in thought. To the contrary, Rosenzweig and Rosenstock see in this an inescapable imperative, from which even those who are clear about the extent to which these idealistic systems fall short of their ambitions, cannot escape. But this insight is not a justification for the flight into skepticism and agnosticism, as is produced by a boundless and objectively anarchical specialization. Therefore, it must be stressed in the strongest of terms: Both authors emphasize in their correspondence how much they care about making a “step into the system,” how much the New Thinking has systematic character. Thus Rosenzweig is able to complain, in the epilogue mentioned above, that people did not understand one thing about his Star—it is a system of philosophy.57 But also Rosenstock, who had a reputation as the epitome of an asymmetrical thinker and for volatility, declares in the correspondence of 1916 that he believed to have taken the “redeeming step into the system.”58 But of which type is a system, which stands in contrast to the system of idealism as well as positivism’s agnostic absence of systems?

Rosenzweig’s discovery of the systematic meaning of meta-logic and meta-ethics Rosenzweig drew the systemic consequences of his oral and written dialogue with Rosenstock from a number of letters. The most important one is addressed to Rudolf Ehrenberg and dated November 11, 1917. It has been reproduced in Kleine Schriften as the “original cell” of the Star.59 The letter begins by recalling the mutual discussions of the concept of revelation with Rudolf Ehrenberg on a hike in 1914. Then it proceeds to paraphrase Rosenstock’s letter of October 28, 1916, in which Rosenstock

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states, that he received from this letter the all-important answer: REVELATION IS ORIENTATION.60 This sentence has been commented on and discussed in the preceding sections. For Rosenzweig, it became the motivation to conceive the first systemic plan of the New Thinking—that is, to conceive the “original cell” of the Star. It needs to be highlighted that it was the concept of revelation, which operated as the organ of a new system. It was probably this fact that led to the narrow religious-philosophical misunderstanding of the New Thinking. One cannot elucidate the meaning of the concept of revelation for the New Thinking without pointing that—next to the jurist Rosenstock and the historian Rosenzweig—the actual philosopher of the New Thinking was Hans Ehrenberg. In the “original cell,” Hans Ehrenberg is rightly referred to as the decisive philosophical referee. It was Hans Ehrenberg who had proven in his examinations of Fichte, the key importance that the concept of revelation had in the dualistic history of systems.61 This should be mentioned, because recently the opinion has often been voiced that the conceptual phase of the Star had been influenced by Cohen. Just how erroneous this is has already been shown by our preceding discussions, but it had also been concretely noted by Rosenzweig in exactly that aforementioned epilogue. As was not otherwise possible, Ehrenberg’s evidence starts with Kant and shows how the system-determining role of the concept of revelation is already anchored in his philosophy. In his essay of 1786, Was heißt: Sich im Denken orientieren?, Kant suggests how a reasonable understanding of God takes up its responsibility by opening itself up to criticism and simultaneously to the criteria of all revelation. Nowhere else but in Ehrenberg do I find it as clearly analyzed, that it is this revelation-teaching of Kant that is the basis of Fichte, when he seeks to embrace the whole work of critical philosophy under the title of a critique of all revelation (1792). Ehrenberg now reveals that it is exactly here, where the precursor of the Wissenschaftslehre is to be found, which had been published two years before. According to Ehrenberg, the origin of the absolute I is religious-philosophical. The concept of I was developed on the basis of a teaching of God, in which God’s entire activity was identified with the act of self-revelation of the godly I. The ensuing idealist history of systems was determined by the elimination and replacement of creation as the central systemic concept with the concept of revelation. This is especially true for Fichte himself, in whose Wissenschaftslehre of 1812 it reads: “God is: right. He reveals Himself: right—in gnosis, only in it. What is, is God in Himself and His revelation, the latter: gnosis. Whatever else appears to be, only appears to

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be, namely, in gnosis.”62 The systematic meaning of the concept of revelation becomes discernible for everybody. Revelation, thus is the central concept of mediation in the system of idealism. It is suitable, because it—understood as the self-revelation of God—can also be the model for the relation between absolute and finite spirit, for the selfascertainment of the finite spirit in the absolute one. This is how Schelling will later express it: Revelation is original knowledge. As we know, Hegel also remained in this tradition of this understanding of revelation, when he interpreted his logic as characterizing the nature of God in Himself; the other parts of his system were, correspondingly, interpreted as the stepping-out-Himself of God in His revelation. In the “original cell,” Rosenzweig describes that his task is to prove the new concept of revelation in such a way that it could be argumentatively demonstrated which new realities it could uncover; realities that have been sealed off from post-1800 philosophical consciousness. Naturally, this should not lead to the discretionary objection that the absolutism of 1800 had been a mere historical selfdeception and, thus, a self-elevating relativism. Doing so, one would fall back to the kind of relativism, of which Rosenzweig had been so deeply convinced that it should be forever prohibited. If this path of relativism is forever closed, there is nothing else but to admit that the absolute consciousness of 1800 was not a self-deception, but truth, and therefore also historical fact. Rosenzweig can rightly be said to have discovered a new relationship between the absolute and the relative. In this relationship, the relative is not inherent to the absolute, but vice versa: “Man has two relationships with the absolute; one, where it has him; but there is also another one, where he has it.”63 This means that the emergence of absolute consciousness at a specific date in history proves a more general truth. History, far from being a conglomerate of coincidences, is the domain of a particular way of manifesting truth: I believe that, in the life of all living things, there are instances, perhaps even only one instance, where it speaks the truth. One does not have to say anything about the living, but one only has to record the instance where it speaks the truth. The dialogue created by these interconnected monologues (that they establish a dialogue, this is the great mystery of the world), the apparent, the revealed, the content of revelation … this dialogue emerging out of these monologues, this is what I believe to be the whole truth.64

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These are wholly unexpected perspectives that open up here. If the utterance of truth is a specific, historical, and biographical instance—then what about the before and after? The living being who does not yet speak, or who is no longer speaking, is not simply not existing, nor not present. If one negates this, then one must be able to say what exactly is the living being who has not yet spoken or who has ceased to speak. For a living being, the instance of speech can come at any time. Rosenzweig recognized that this is something that cannot be described in the categories of possibilities and properties. Man, who can speak only his own truth, is neither the subject of ethics nor of biology nor anthropology. He is the subject of what Rosenzweig—in the Star—calls the meta-ethical or the self of man. We believe it is especially important that Rosenzweig, in contrast to all philosophical irrationalism, recognized the existentialist and systemic meaning of the meta-ethical and developed it further. Man as the metaethical. This means to understand man as the relational concept of life as a form of communication. Rosenzweig assumes that for all living beings, the instance of speaking truth can come. That is why extra-human reality becomes part of this new perspective. If life is not only a biological process or an indefinable force, but a form of communication, then it cannot be initially presupposed, who or what does or does not take part in this communication. And again, Rosenzweig discovers a new aspect of reality which had not yet been categorically understood. In the Star, he will call it the meta-logical, the world, or its sense. This was a terminological decision of significant consequence. World ceased to be a purely structural concept (in the sense of cosmos) or a mere maximal value (in the sense of universe) of everything that is. Here, by contrast, world is understood as a concept of truth, which is oriented towards the purely factual being of things. We saw that the explanations of the new concept of revelation, gained throughout the dialogue with Rosenstock, reach beyond religion and theology. Thus, it is not at all surprising that Rosenzweig had a consciousness of the meta-religious character of Jewish and Christian faith already 20 years prior to Bonhoeffer, and in a more precise theologically defined sense than the latter: The exceptional position of Judaism and Christianity is, even when they become religions, that they find motivations inside themselves to liberate themselves from this link to religion and to find their way back to the open field of reality. All historical religion is endowed toward specialism, only Judaism and Christianity became specialist first—and not for long—and

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were never endowed this way. Originally, they were something wholly unreligious, the one a fact, the other an event.65

From this knowledge results the historical perceptiveness, which led Rosenzweig to note (a whole half century prior to the Geneva conference of church and society): “For us, it is now about 1789. Since then, the church lacks a relationship with the state, it only has one with society.”66 If one compares the insights of the New Thinking with Rosenzweig’s suggestion, to characterize this as “absolute empiricism,” it is regrettable that he uses and links two terms that directly contradict the achievements of the New Thinking.67 The experience at stake here was something wholly different than what is traditionally known as empiricism. Furthermore, the adjective absolute is completely inappropriate to mark this difference.

Rosenstock’s formulation of a fundamental grammar for psychology, sociology, and history In contrast to Rosenzweig, Rosenstock examined the systemic aspects of the New Thinking in a number of ways. The first was his response to the question Rosenzweig posed in December 1916: “If you want to write me about details, please do so about languages. Through mysterious empirical detours, I ended up close to you, which is what I also wanted, but I did not know how to begin it all.”68 The fact that Rosenstock actually responds and fulfils this request becomes apparent in Rosenzweig’s letter to Rudolf Ehrenberg of March 29, 1916.69 This document, created by Rosenstock in late 1916 and early 1917, is the oldest document of what otherwise—and confusingly—appears in contemporary history of philosophy as “speech-thinking,” “personalism,” and the “I-You principle.” These characterizations have to be rejected on theological and speechtheoretical grounds. Rosenstock does not proclaim some sort of principle, but develops his thoughts about revelation, according to which it is speech—and not religion—which is the primary level and primary medium of the relationship between God and man. Speech is an indication that man can ultimately be defined only as the one who is addressed by God. Even more abstruse are these characterizations in speech-theoretical terms. Rosenstock does not presuppose simultaneity of I and You. The fundamental thought of his teaching of speech is the priority of the You which results from the address and the imperative. Rosenstock explains

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the constitution of I, with a corresponding consciousness of I, as a reaction that can only follow subsequently from the address and the imperative. Rosenstock interprets the third person—the he, the she, the it of grammar—as a third stage of objective objectification that cannot be considered as the starting position of consciousness. Rosenstock assigns tempora to these aggregate speech forms. The imperative is assigned to the second person; the I is assigned to conjunctive and voluntative tempora. The indicative, which does not—as in Hebrew—possess present character, belongs to the sphere of the third person. Rosenstock’s analysis of the grammatical persons is fruitful also in sociological terms. All that is said about the second person and the imperative is reflected in the oral practice of spiritual and worldly law. Art, in turn, is—under the circumstances of this teaching of speech—the most sociologically comprehensive generalization of conjunctive and voluntative (voluntativen) speech in the first person. Nobody can seriously doubt that the language of science is but a special form of objectification, as corresponds to the gender of the third person.70 The immediate political and moral importance of this fundamental grammar was already tested in 1919, in the context of the argument with Spengler’s Decline of the West (Untergang des Abendlandes). Whereas academic science revealed the impotence of specialization in a series of micro-corrections—as evidenced in Spengler’s famous journal issue “Logos” of 1921 and the enthusiastic reception of Spengler by theologians such as Gogarten—Rosenstock was the only one who recognized which spirit’s offspring were at stake in this book. [Spengler’s] work uncovers how deep the disease of the European spirit already is, that it evades its rejuvenation out of eternal springs. Spengler does not want to live. This is the scary element of such an occurrence; the soul puts forward all its healing powers in order to die.71

In contrast to everybody else who was content with the corrections of Spengler’s numerous mistakes, Rosenstock—already in 1919—looks into the cultural-morphological thesis that divulges the unity of human history, but which—through Toynbee—conquered an undisputed customary right in academic universal history. Already at the beginning of our catastrophic century, Rosenstock argues that Spengler—as a typical pre-war thinker—seeks to cling on to the classicistic-tragic cultural idea that had already influenced Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Niedergang und Fall des römischen Imperiums; 1776-1788).

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Rosenstock stands against this idea with his consciousness, that a real historical morphology cannot be abstracted from the historicity of speech, as is testified already in the title of Spengler’s work. For a non-Christian book, he uses the Christian term of Occident (Abendland), instead of using the classicist term Europe. The word decline (Untergang) reveals the attempt to posit as fate what was a consequence of political behavior. Rosenstock was able to summarize his whole criticism by translating the title The Decline of the West (or Occident) (Der Untergang des Abendlandes) as “The Suicide of Europe” (“Der Selbstmord Europas”).72 Five years after the critique against Spengler, Rosenstock reformulated his teaching of speech and published it under the title Angewandte Seelenkunde. The core of this text is the letter to Rosenzweig, mentioned above, on languages. Rosenstock had expanded on it and now called it a “grammar of the soul.” The aim of his foray was to seek a re-orientation of post-war psychology, which could serve as a bridge to sociology, a discipline that was growing ever more important in universities and societies alike. This characterized the ominous condition of society after 1918: while scientific psychology reduced man to a bundle of nerves, drives, and stimuli—not caring about how this related to the other contents of life— there also flourished a sub-culture of occultism, whose menace rested in a reversed disrespect by theology, medicine, psychology, and sociology. Already in his criticism of Spengler, Rosenstock had spoken about the relevance of revolutions for history as a whole.73 This was a very important statement. It specifically denotes what Rosenstock’s critique of psychology and sociology was all about. This was the unexplained relationship of psychology and sociology with history, as the embodiment of the whole reality of human life. The title and subtitle of Rosenstock’s first main work, published in 1931, clearly elucidate the link of history with psychology and sociology. It promised to examine the European Revolutions in light of national characters and the formation of nationstates. This concept also emerges in the dialogue with Rosenzweig. Interestingly, it emerges in a letter of Rosenzweig, in which he—contrary to Rosenstock’s expectation—vows to be a devoted student of the teaching of revolutions. Rosenzweig also puts to Russia as a confirmation for Rosenstock’s predictions.

4. Conclusion We set out to explore the discovery of the New Thinking. It was a remarkable tale to tell, the tale of how several thinkers have to

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contemplate their own familiar and academic context with a fresh pair of eyes—far away from all the theological schools and ecclesiastical fronts of their time, in the middle of their juridical and historical work, and long before the outbreak of World War I. They were dismayed by what they found. “Good-natured, wisdom-worshiping, and in the midst of selfdissolution,” this is how Rosenstock describes why the scenery of his life—in terms of family, state, university, and church—had so completely changed. 74 In 1916, both Rosenzweig and Rosenstock did not know how dangerous this new territory would be. In 1935, when—after his emigration, after the synods of avowal of Barmen and Dahlem, and at the time when the failure of the Kirchenkampf already became apparent— Rosenstock drafted the preface for the edition of the 1916 correspondence, the writing was on the wall: The front, which was commemorated and fought for, was not the one of private and personal existence, but—as Rosenstock says in a re-interpretation of Barth—it was the one of “theological existence today.” This amounts to a remarkable increase in significance of this famous formula. In Rosenstock’s eyes, theological existence does not mean only existential probation of theology and theological pertinence of the church. It also refers, as Rosenstock himself highlights, to the “eternal, typical, supra-personal questions of being of Jew and Christian in the midst of this world of nations.” Rosenstock did not suspect, when writing these words, that these questions would—a few years later—be reduced to the being or non-being of Jews. But even in 1935, the letters written in 1916 attested: Whenever decisions about the being or non-being of Jews are being made in this world of nations, it is also about the being or non-being of Christians. Crete and Berlin May / June 1987 Wolfgang Ullmann (1929-2004), was a renowned theologian and Lecturer in Church History at the Kirchliches Obersminar in Naumburg, and the Sprachenkonvikt in Berlin. At the time of German re-unification, he was a Member of the Central Roundtable in Berlin (1989-1990), and subsequently became a Member of Alliance 90 in the German Parliament (1990-1994), and a Member of Alliance 90 / The Greens Party in the European Parliament (1994-1998).

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Roland Vogt is Visiting Assistant Professor in the European Studies Programme at the University of Hong Kong. His research areas are SinoEuropean relations, Anglo-German policy toward China, the phenomenon of political leadership, and summit diplomacy / diplomatic history.

CHAPTER SEVEN FRANZ ROSENZWEIG’S LETTERS TO MARGRIT ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY, 1917-1922 (1989)1 HAROLD M. STAHMER

Editors’ note. This paper by Harold Stahmer and its addendum (an explanation to readers and a letter from Alexander Altmann) were originally published in Year Book XXXIV, Leo Baeck Institute, 1989, pp. 385–409. To the extent possible, this reprint replicates the presentation of these documents, as published. Prof. Stahmer and the Leo Baeck Institute have kindly granted us permission to use them here.

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most scholars have been unaware of the fact that between mid-July of 1917 and June of 1922 Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) wrote at least 1,239 “Liebes Gritli” letters to Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy (1893-1959), the wife of his friend, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973), a fellow philosopher, Privatdozent in NTIL QUITE RECENTLY

1 This article is the product of co-operation, assistance, and consultations with numerous informed individuals who, for various reasons, are interested in the impact that Eugen and Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig had on one another’s lives. I am extremely indebted to Rafael Rosenzweig and Dr. Hans R. Huessy for their permission to have access to and write about the unpublished letters of Franz Rosenzweig to Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy; to Ulrike von Haeften von Moltke for her meticulous and time-consuming efforts in transcribing, organising and assisting in the selection of this material; to Mark Huessy, Freya von Moltke and Dr. George Allen Morgan for their willingness to collaborate in translating Rosenzweig’s difficult style into English; and to those individuals who, over the years, have contributed in various ways to my understanding of the personalities and issues discussed in this paper: to Dr. Hans R. Huessy, Lotti Huessy, Professor Nahum Glatzer, the late Professor Alexander Altmann, the late Arthur A. Cohen, Professor Dorothy Emmet, Dr. Eckard Wilkens, Lise van der Molen, Professor Konrad von Moltke, the Leo Baeck Institute staff and, of course, to the two individuals who in 1948 started me on this pilgrimage—Eugen and Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy.

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law, and Christian, who exercised a crucial influence on the development of Rosenzweig’s life and thought. The contents of these letters constitute a personal diary of Rosenzweig’s inner and outer life during this formative stage in his tragically short but brilliantly creative and productive career. During this period, Rosenzweig wrote the “Germ Cell” (Urzelle) to The Star of Redemption (1917), the Star itself (1921), the “Introduction” to (and published) Hegel and the State (1920), wrote On Education and Understanding the Sick and the Healthy (1920), became engaged to and married Edith Hahn (1920), assumed his leadership role at the famous Lehrhaus in Frankfurt (1920), noticed the first symptoms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (1921), and began his translation of the poems of Yehuda Halevi (1922). By December of 1922, Rosenzweig could no longer write without assistance, and by the spring of 1923 his ability to speak had ceased entirely. This paper will focus primarily on the contents of those letters that relate to Rosenzweig’s writing of the Star of Redemption and the personalities and forces which figured prominently in his life during that period. It will also provide interested readers and scholars with an opportunity to enlarge their understanding and appreciation of the degree to which the lives of Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen and Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy were intertwined, and the profound significance that this has for our understanding not only of the life and thought of Franz Rosenzweig, but also of his friend, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. 1 A major theme throughout this paper will be the important role that “letters”, “speech-letters” (Sprachbriefe),2 played in the lives and in the creation and shaping of some of the major writings of those involved in this “trialogue”. Letters serve two functions in this paper: first, they provide us with information about the forces, personalities and events in 2

With respect to the format followed in this paper: Except where a published source is indicated, all the quotations from Franz Rosenzweig’s letters to Margrit and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy are from unpublished letters, most of them from the unpublished correspondence from the estate of Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy (18931959). An asterisk (*) in the body of Rosenzweig’s letters represents his own shorthand reference to The Star of Redemption. In most of the letters from this period, Eugen and Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy are addressed simply as Eugen and Margrit Rosenstock. Although he was born Eugen Rosenstock, he added his Swiss wife Margrit’s name, Huessy, to his own when they were married in 1914; hence, the hyphenated name, Rosenstock-Huessy. However, he continued to sign his publications and was recognised professionally mostly as Eugen Rosenstock until he emigrated to the United States in 1933.

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Rosenzweig’s life prior to and during the period 1917-1922. But second and more importantly, letters, especially those that Rosenzweig regarded as “speech-letters”, were often the vehicles, the sources of inspiration, transformation, and confirmation for his life and writings. One year after Margrit Rosenstock wrote her first letter to Franz Rosenzweig, he wrote to her, “I’ve spoken a long letter to you.” (4th October 1918) Rosenzweig discussed the importance of letters on a number of occasions. One of his most illuminating discussions is in an unpublished “Dear Gritli” letter shortly after he had begun to write in his Star of Redemption (2nd September 1918). I have the greatest reserve towards burning letters. I’ve never done it when it wasn’t absolutely necessary. Words blow away or rather they transform themselves into answers. [A pun on the German: Wort (word)—Ant-wort (answer).] But a written word, writing in general, means that the person wasn’t satisfied with moments of contact and the present, but rather was creating permanence, bridges across the distances in space and time. Anything which has withstood this test, the test of small permanency—and the most fleetingly written word has withstood it—doesn’t have to be scared of large permanency. I recently wrote to you about forgetting. One may forget a spoken word, but one has to preserve written ones, at least as long as one is “preserving oneself,” that is, as long as one lives. The human life is the large permanency of which the written word has brought its proof of capability by overcoming the small permanency. The letters that I have received from someone are to me like a piece of his life that has been given into my custody; I would feel as though I were dealing deathblows, were I to burn them; so I find it hard even with indifferent letters; I usually even save invitations, if they are in writing. The fleeting character, which written words have too, is accepted and dissolved in the answer, just as with spoken words. A letter which has been answered is no longer “too intimate.” I approach a letter with hesitation and shyness only as long as it is unanswered, but regardless of what the answer is like, it admits the letter, eradicates its fleeting character, and what remains is permanent.

In a most remarkable way, Franz Rosenzweig’s life, his writing the Star, including much of its basic structure and contents, are a reflection and expression of his biographical pilgrimage, his spiritual odyssey, as revealed in his relationships with and his letters to—during this and earlier periods—not just his mother and his cousin, Gertrud Oppenheim, but especially to his “circle”, as he referred to it; consisting of Eugen Rosenstock (Huessy), his wife, Margrit Rosenstock, known to her family and close friends as “Gritli”, his two cousins, Rudolf and Hans Ehrenberg, and also Viktor von Weizsäcker; all of whom, incidentally, were Protestant Christians.

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In an autobiographical essay published in 1959, the year that Margrit died, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy remarked “... that the printed word was not radically different to me from the words spoken or written between friends. Fittingly, letters have played an immense role in my life. The letters printed in Franz Rosenzweig’s volume of letters are a good example of their role in my existence. Many books got started as letters.” In a 1984 article in Modern Judaism I discussed the impact that “speech-letters” had on the lives and on many of the writings of Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and suggested that the events, personalities, and processes that shaped Rosenzweig’s life were perhaps more important to him personally than were many of his major writings, especially The Star of Redemption.2 I suggested, for example, that Rosenzweig had experienced and lived the roles of pagan, Christian, and Jew in a most remarkable manner before he ever began to write the Star. His spiritual pilgrimage through these three phases or metamorphoses is described not only in the Star, but in his “New Thinking” and in Understanding the Sick and the Healthy. These literary and scholarly works were outward responses to an inward spiritual turbulence. They were not planned or thought out but rather they exploded into print as a kind of visible sign or mark that yet another stage in life had been completed. And once “out of his system”, works like the Star appeared to have fulfilled an inner need, and hence, served the purpose that Rosenzweig intended. Remember that Rosenzweig wrote in his diary in 1906, “Better write than read, better write poetry than write, better live than write poetry”, and in 1919 concluded the Star with the words, “Into Life”. And the following year, in a letter to his revered former teacher, Friedrich Meinecke (30th August 1920), he said, “The man who wrote the Star of Redemption … is of a very different calibre from the author of Hegel and the State. Yet when all is said and done, the new book is only—a book.”3 The existence of these unpublished letters is due to the loyalty and devotion of Anna Henke, the Rosenstocks’ housekeeper and close friend, who arranged for their being shipped to America when the Rosenstocks left Germany in 1933. In a letter to a friend (3rd December 1945), Rosenstock-Huessy says that the copy of the Rosenzweig letter that he is sending him “… travelled, with a score of other Franz-letters, inside a big clock. Our good Anna hid them there without telling us.” He then adds, “Thousands of other Franz-letters remained behind and are still, in Margrit’s home. A whole commentary of the Stern is found in them, for these letters accompanied the parts of the Stern as they were written and mailed to Margrit. It would seem”, he concluded, “that these letters really deserve your attention.”4 After his wife’s death in 1959, Rosenstock-

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Huessy laboriously copied by hand 68 of the 117 “Dear Gritli” letters that Rosenzweig had written while writing the Star.5 In addition to the available relevant published material, I have read approximately 270 of the estimated 1,500 letters that Rosenzweig wrote to Margrit Rosenstock between mid-July 1917 and June 1922, after which, due to his illness, he began to dictate most of his correspondence. Most of the new material spans the period from 6th August 1917 to the middle of 1922 but includes a few letters dictated by Rosenzweig as late as 5th April 1924. These include 117 letters that we know of that Rosenzweig wrote to Margrit Rosenstock between 22nd August 1918 and 16th February 1919, while writing the Star. In addition, I have read some 50 unpublished “Dear Eugen” letters of this period and three that Rosenzweig wrote jointly to “Eugen and Margrit”. These letters range in length from about 200 to more than 1,000 words, the average consisting of about 300-400 words. By comparison, the significance of this unpublished material for those familiar with the published letters of Rosenzweig in the 1979 Martinus Nijhoff edition is interesting in a number of respects. For example, in the 1979 edition, there are a total of 33 published letters written during the period when Rosenzweig wrote the first draft of the Star: 26 are to Rosenzweig’s mother, three are to Gertrud Oppenheim, one to Rudolf Ehrenberg, one to Hans Ehrenberg, one to a man Rosenzweig met in hospital, Mawrik Kahn, and one to Bertha Badt-Strauss. Four of these letters refer to the Star, two are to his mother, and in one of them (11th October 1918), he mentions having sent her five parts of his draft of “Die Elemente oder Das Immerwährende.” In a letter to Rudolf Ehrenberg (4th September 1918), Rosenzweig outlines and describes his tentative plan for the Star and adds that “A theory of language and a philosophy of art infuse the entire work”. Rosenzweig wrote a similar letter outlining the structure of the Star to Gertrud Oppenheim (25th September 1918). The point to be stressed is that editorial decisions were made not to include, either in the 1937 edition or in the recent two-volume 1979 edition of Rosenzweig’s Letters, any of the letters that Rosenzweig wrote to either Margrit or Eugen Rosenstock during the period that he wrote his Star of Redemption. In fact, there are no published letters to either of them between December 1917 and July 1924, the period when most of the estimated 1,500 “Dear Gritli” letters and at least another 50 important letters either to Eugen or to both Eugen and Margrit Rosenstock were written.6 The information contained in these new unpublished letters constitutes further substantiation of the claims made not only by Rosenstock-Huessy, but by other scholars, about the significance of the encounter between

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Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy on the evening of 7th July 1913 for Rosenzweig’s life and thought, and the importance for both men of their 1916 correspondence on “Judaism and Christianity”. However, what is probably of greatest interest for students of Rosenzweig is the information contained in these letters about the influence of the Rosenstocks, not only on the decision to write the Star, but on the plan and substance of major portions of this great work. In addition, the contents of these letters hold valuable information about a wide variety of issues, personalities, and forces that influenced Rosenzweig during the period from 1913 until 1922. It should be noted that there are also a number of letters dictated by Rosenzweig that were sent to one or both of the Rosenstocks after 1922.

Franz and Eugen: 7th July 1913 to 1916 During their 1916 exchange of letters Rosenzweig said to Rosenstock, “ ... you did once rightly compel me to do it (commit, anatomically speaking, Hara-Kiri) in Leipzig in 1913, when you would not seriously believe me, and did not allow anything I said to be really my own words, until I myself was horrified at how rotten was my flesh and how torpid my blood; then I myself had to turn to an examination of my anatomy.”7 On 31st October 1913, after Rosenzweig had decided not to be baptised, but rather to “reaffirm” his Judaism, he wrote to his cousin, Rudolf Ehrenberg: In that night’s conversation in Leipzig, Rosenstock pushed me step by step out of the last relativist positions that I still occupied, and forced me to take an absolute standpoint. I was inferior to him from the outset, since I had to recognise for my part, too, the justice of his attack. If I could then have buttressed my dualism between revelation and the world with a metaphysical dualism between God and the Devil [he meant to say if he could have split himself into two halves, a religious and a worldly one] I should have been unassailable. But I was prevented from doing so by the first sentence of the Bible. This piece of common ground forced me to face him. This has remained even afterwards, in the weeks that followed, the fixed point of departure. Any form of philosophical relativism is now impossible to me.

Commenting on their encounter in 1913, Alexander Altmann, in his pioneering essay in 1945, said that, “It was the most decisive and most farreaching event in Rosenzweig’s life. It produced a crisis from which, after months of struggle, the new Rosenzweig emerged.”8 Reflecting on their 1913 meeting, Rosenstock-Huessy said that their discussion focused on a sentence from a novel by Selma Lagerlöf, The Miracles of the Antichrist. “Nobody can redeem men from their sufferings, but much shall be

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forgiven him who re-encourages them to bear these sufferings.” He added, “This sentence is full of faith and full of skepticism, both, and on that warm evening its thesis was chased around and around—and around again. Franz, a student of philosophy and history for eight years by that time, defended the prevailing philosophical relativism of the day, whereas Eugen bore witness to prayer and worship at his prime guides to action. The three men separated very late that night, never to touch on the subject of religion again until l9l6.”9 In a letter to this author (31st January 1956), Rosenstock-Huessy discussed the nature of the “dialogue” between him and Rosenzweig in 1913. At the time I was completing a dissertation at Cambridge on language in Buber’s dialogical writings and asked Rosenstock-Huessy for his comments about authentic dialogue. His response included a reference to the four-fold character of RosenstockHuessy’s “system” known as the “Cross of Reality” which contains his “grammatical” method, which is his form of “speech-thinking”. As to dialogue, itself and existentially taken, I suppose that we must speak when one of us is prevented from verbal agreement at the outset. Franz could, in 1913, meet the presence of the living God, in our encounter, and in so far, I was able to witness to him of God’s real presence. But when this actual experience led to our dialogue so that we transferred to each other like billiard balls the native rhythm and speed of our natural characters in a miraculous exchange of biographical intensity, then the eloquence of the dialogue rested on the fact of facts that Franz could renounce everything except his having to become a Christian. And this indeed was the outcome of the Stern and is (that) of the Kreuz der Wirklichkeit ... Never could Franz either deny conversion or abandon Judaism, but a conversion to God and hence a voluntary choice of the Jewish starting point of revelation, this was his way out. Without an insurmountable existential block, no dialogue discovers a new third way. It creates out of one common yearning and one existential NO a creative, new solution.

Included among Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy’s many “Franz letters” is one dated 15th January 1920 that Rosenzweig wrote to Rosenstock just nine days after he became engaged to Edith Hahn. The letter documents the significance of his encounter with Rosenstock in 1913 for Rosenzweig’s life and also his forthcoming marriage. My dear Eugen, I did not need Rudi’s confirmation today that you “cannot be glad,” indeed, I wrote Gritli only yesterday that I knew it from the start. What had happened to you with me in 1913 has repeated itself. At that time you converted me to Christianity. I yielded and—entered the synagogue. That was in our first year. Today, in our seventh—you remember the night

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Chapter Seven when I reminded you, you yourself had marked its beginning with your prayer, it was probably in fact the same night as then in Leipzig in 1913— so today you wanted to convert me to paganism, I yielded and—am founding my Jewish home. That is thus evidently your fate with me. But you can believe me: my yielding this time is exactly as complete as in 1913, and has as little chance ever to be lost to me; and as I date my Jewish homecoming not from that day, 13th October in Berlin, but from our Leipzig night, so my marriage, not from the day of engagement but from the day of my yielding to you…

Another example of the extent to which Rosenstock had affected Rosenzweig’s life is referred to in a “Dear Gritli” letter dated 24th June 1918, two months before Rosenzweig began to write his Star, in which he reacts to a letter he had received the previous day from Rosenstock that had deeply offended him. This letter is an outstanding example of the way in which the lives of Rosenzweig and Eugen and Margrit Rosenstock were intertwined during this period. Dear Gritli, your letter of the 18th came as a straggler. I did not know at all what the “poison formula” was in the letter the day before yesterday; now I know and understand it just as little, however. For how can he thus designate our relationship to each other—he, who after all himself first found the definitive formula for it. I note that you are doing the work of the letter book still more for Eugen than for Rudi. It seems he must see himself once again black on white before his eyes. What an uncanny power is in him, to be able to leave nothing settled; he has to get everything moving again; his heart has no treasure-vaults in which he henceforth conserves and preserves gems once made. He is like E. T. A. Hoffmann’s goldsmith in Paris, who murders his customers—the latter wants indeed only to keep his gems to himself, he on the contrary cannot stand at all that anything exists that his hand has finished. I cannot follow him there. I could not start the conversation of 1916 again from the beginning. That was not a game of chess, where one wins, and where next time a return match is granted; it is our joint work, what the two of us could do on it together and in the war in 1916 is done; there is no longer any struggle between me and him; if he should want to renew it today—I would feel it with disgust as a merely intellectual affair, like my present discussion of it with Hans, for whose long interruption I am not the least sorry. His feeling of self-assertion is quite incomprehensible to me. Against me? Against me? Against one who was probably the first, after you, to believe in him? And who will believe in him as long—as long as we are left to belief? And must he still “assert” himself even against me? Does he then not feel what it means that I believe in him? Doesn’t he know not only how hard it was to have to believe him but how hard it is. How much easier my life would be if I didn’t need to believe him. He is the point at which my life turned around and therefore

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the chain that drags along behind me. It is certainly no coincidence that I had to speak to [Hermann] Cohen about my relationship to Eugen and about nothing else, once I had the feeling that I had to spread myself out before him, totally! He became fate for me earlier than I did for him. But it is not natural that I also had to become it for him? Look, that is what has helped me get over the horrible feeling of knowing him jealous: that he learned to believe in me only in a wild shaking of his being—of mind and spirit—beyond the consciousness of our “planetary belonging” to each other—the actual man-to-man belief in the reality of my existence—as I learned it with him in that equally dreadful, thorough shaking on that Leipzig evening nearly five years ago, during and after which I after all did not treat him very nicely, either. There is just nothing harder than this apparently easiest thing: to believe mutually in each other’s reality. “Love thy neighbour—he is like you,” yes, really like you, wholly like you! You have not monopolised reality, with the others being mere figures of your Weltanschauung, mere film ghosts on a white wall, as you would like to persuade yourself ever again; but really like you, human like you—human! Should I perhaps have written this, which has just sprung from the pen under your eyes that peer over my shoulder, rather than to him, himself, directly? But there is something like bashfulness in me to say to him. Can I then? Does he really not know it? And have I not already told him? Except the last, naturally—and perhaps even that. Did not even he himself say it at the close of the letter of last year which I recently wrote you? He must surely become clear-headed again and learn ıȣȝijȚȜİȚȞ—there is nobody there, with whom he could ıȣȞȑȤșİȚȞ .You say it to him if I do not produce the word. Indeed, you are the connecting vein—in you the pulses that cease to circulate must mix and renew themselves—.

In another “Dear Gritli” letter two years later (15th June 1920), Rosenzweig wrote, It is a great act of mercy that once God has uprooted me out of life during my life. From July to September 1913, I was quite willing to die—to let everything within myself die. But this may not be made into a rule. Most men simply live their life’s fate, or destiny, and nothing more. It is extraordinary in us that God in our case has not only spoken to us through our lives; in addition he has made the life around us fall down like the wings of a theatrical decoration, and on the empty stage he has spoken to us.10

At this juncture it should be made abundantly clear that there were, indeed, other personalities and forces operative in Rosenzweig’s life as early as 1909 and 1910. Alexander Altmann alluded to this when he said, “There is evidence that Rosenzweig had an ‘existential’ philosophy before he met Rosenstock though the decisive turn toward the ‘new thinking’ was

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undoubtedly due to Rosenstock’s influence.”11 Documentation not only of the existence prior to 1913 of threads of Rosenzweig’s post-Hegelian thinking, but evidence of his wrestling with questions bearing upon his religious identity can be found in the article by Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, and in the one by Amos Funkenstein.12 While Funkenstein and I may emphasise different elements that help us to understand the “biographical circumstances” that influenced Rosenzweig’s “Urzelle” and writing of the Star, I share his conviction that the more we understand Rosenzweig’s intellectual and spiritual biography, the better our understanding of the Star. While it may be, as he put it, “a triviality that any philosophical system in some measure objectivizes biographical moments”, it definitely points those interested in the Star in the right direction.

From 1916 to 1918: From the “Speech-Letters” to the Star On at least two separate occasions, Rosenzweig acknowledged his indebtedness to Rosenstock for his formulation of the Star. In a letter to Rudolf Hallo (4th February 1923), Rosenzweig said, “Without Eugen I would never have written the Star of Redemption”, and in his 1925 essay, “The New Thinking,” he stated, “When I wrote the Star of Redemption ... The main influence was Eugen Rosenstock; a full year and a half before I began to write I had seen the rough draft of his now published Angewandte Seelenkunde.”13 In the last letter of their 1916 correspondence, Rosenzweig said to Rosenstock: “If you want to write to me about particular matters, please write to me about ‘The Languages’. I have, I believe, approached very near to you by strange, empirical, circuitous ways. I certainly wanted to do this, but I just didn’t know how to go about it.” According to Rosenstock, it was in reference to this request from his friend that he composed a lengthy statement on Sprachdenken, representing a distillation of some of the fruits of his own “speech-thinking” since long before the war—since 1902. This Sprachbrief ... proved to be the first draft and the last one in all save minor details of Eugen’s Angewandte Seelenkunde.14 That Rosenstock attached special significance to this “speech-letter” is attested to in a letter to his wife, Margrit, written on 5th January 1917. Dear good woman, Take these pages and read. And when you get to the end, you’ll know, that this long trip has only led me to you and that your word in the last letter is united with mine in God’s word. It’s evening. I’ve been writing all day in order to get everything done before packing. As I don’t like to let

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the pages flutter away without preserving them, I therefore beg of you: make a copy, at best with a typewriter; if that’s too hard, then do it by hand, and only thereafter may Franz receive it ... Of course, the best [part] cannot be written about here. But when you read the Sprachlehre, remember, that the men [referring to himself and Franz] have also got a taste of it.15

And next there are portions from a very tender and moving letter (5th April 1924) to Rosenstock from Adele Rosenzweig, Franz’s mother (“Tante Dele” to him), after reading a copy of the first published version of Angewandte Seelenkunde that Rosenstock had sent to her which he had dedicated to Rosenzweig. Those familiar with the stresses and anguish in Adele Rosenzweig’s life, particularly over the preceding seven years, will appreciate her tone and sentiments. Her concluding sentence about her son’s indebtedness to Rosenstock is especially significant for this paper. Dear Eugen! Yesterday evening Fräulein von K. and I finished reading the Seelenkunde … How thoughtfully you turned towards him again in the dedication of the Seelenkunde! I believe that Franz knows full well that what he brought forth in the Stern is yours. He is still speaking today of his ill-gotten gains on which he has been thriving.

Two months prior to publication (5th April 1924), Rosenzweig had sent Rosenstock a long series of comments about Angewandte Seelenkunde. The opening lines from his lengthy letter are relevant and also quite typical of Rosenzweig’s, at times, difficult style. Dear Eugen, Your dedication to me covers modestly the more than oedipal horrors which the “Practical Knowledge of the Soul” has to thank for its origin, for it is indeed my grandchild, and therefore not just your child, but simultaneously your great-grandchild. Apollo, Apollo! Hans’s pen would resist pursuing this more closely.16

Fifty years after his correspondence with Rosenzweig, the period during which his own version of “speech-thinking” as the “grammatical method” matured, Rosenstock-Huessy stated that something he was unaware of in 1916 came to his attention that “bears upon the meaning of all our letter writing” and “eliminates the false doctrines in the literature about conversion (dialogue) and letters”. For “…the prevailing teachings about letters seem to expose the nonsense of our teachers of linguistics in a most devastating way”.

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Chapter Seven In the letters between Franz and Eugen lofty matters were discussed about Judaism and Christianity. However, it may be more important for further generations, what this exchange of letters in itself reveals. Behind the fashionable words “dialogue,” “existentialism,” “involvement,” of course the main issue, which alone embraces the antecedents of these letters, remains unspoken. I ask: what has happened as a consequence to the writers of these letters? What meaning do these letters have on their life histories?17

Rosenstock-Huessy’s answer to the question was that “This exchange ... turned the rhythm of life of both writers inside out. Both had to live quite differently than they had before.”18 He compares their significance to that of “love letters” which have the same effect. The writer of love letters realises that in the writing of the letter something “new” is learned; “namely, that between him and the recipient of the letter there exists a gaping abyss. The letter is, in fact, written to close this abyss.” Thus, when Shakespeare’s Romeo cries out, “It is my soul that calls upon my name”, Romeo “senses that he was indeed called Romeo hitherto, but that not until Juliet called his name did his half soul become whole”. The division within us, the powers “that drag us backwards, drive us forwards, paralyse us from without, excite us from within”, are overcome and united, i.e., our soul and our name grow together, are united, when “the soul speaks aloud our name. This unity is achieved by a surrender to the voice that addresses us and a simultaneous “forgetting about ourselves”. As often as this happens, the person becomes the one that he should become. Because neither can we nor should we become ourselves. We can only achieve our destiny by forgetting “ourselves”.19 Rosenzweig himself had experienced the meaning of Romeo’s “It is my soul that calls upon my name” perhaps as deeply as anyone. He also knew what “speech letters” were all about! On 16th January 1920, ten days after his engagement to Edith Hahn, Rosenzweig wrote to her: Do you know why you were unable at that time to know “the meaning of love”? Because one only knows it when one both loves and is loved. Everything else can, at a pinch, be done one-sidedly, but two are needed for love, and when we have experienced this we lose our taste for all other one-sided activities and do everything mutually. For everything can be done mutually; he who has experienced love discovers it everywhere, its pains as well as its delights. Believe me, a person who loves will no longer tolerate anything dead around him. And since love teaches him “not to run away”, there is nothing left him, whether for good or ill, but to love ... We never awaken for our own sakes; but love brings to life whatever is dead around us. This is the

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sole proof of its authenticity. You see, I can no longer write a “book,” everything now turns into a letter, since I need to see the “other.” That is how I feel now in writing the piece on education. Since today I am really at it. Every once in a while, I have a fit of laziness because it is mere “writing”—I had rather speak—but I go on all the same and make my pen shout.20

“Speech letters” are letters that are wrung or even wrenched from the soul out of a desire for wholeness and unity as well as by the need, according to Rosenstock-Huessy, of “every healthy person… to get rid of himself, as often as possible”. “Franz” realised this secret when he observed in 1913-1914, the time when “Eugen” was writing his “Professorenbuch”, that “Eugen spewed forth this book like a volcano”. And similarly, in Rosenzweig’s life, Little did Franz realise, that the same “spewing forth” would apply equally one day to his own evolving major work, The Star of Redemption. Franz “spewed forth” this encompassing work between the end of August 1918 and February 1919; for which he paid dearly with his subsequent lifeshortening illness ... For the trance of inspiration tore him out of his powerful body and he was never able thereafter to find his way back completely.21

Rosenstock added that their influence on one another was not something either could have been “aware” of for “awareness” is, in and of itself, “a very superficial form of spiritual address or communication” that does not “penetrate very deeply under the skin”. The process of change, the “metamorphosis” that occurred to each was the result of the power of speech that forced each partner to rid himself of his old self and to become united and strengthened in his powers in ways that completely changed the quality and direction of their respective lives. Rosenstock-Huessy summarised what occurred to each fifty years later, a half century of living under the spell of his fascination and preoccupation with speech. To paraphrase the German title of his essay on the “Origin of Speech”, “Im Prägstock eines Menschenschlags oder der tägliche Ursprung der Sprache”, the periodic renewal of speech occurs as new types or forms of creatures are “coined” and “stamped”.22 Thus his statement, “Language is wiser than the one who speaks it. The living language of people always overpowers the thinking of individual man who assumes he could master it.”23 Then Rosenstock said, It is clear to me today, fifty years later, that in 1913 I planted the germ of the “Star” in Franz; and conversely the metamorphosis of my own esoteric

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Rosenzweig’s “Germ Cell” of The Star of Redemption Students interested in understanding Rosenzweig’s Star have always regarded his letter to Rudolf Ehrenberg of 18th November 1917 as the “Germ Cell” of the Star. It was held by the editors of the 1935 and 1979 editions of Rosenzweig’s work to be of such importance that it should not be considered merely a “letter”, and therefore appear among other letters, but rather a major work, more of an essay, similar to his “New Thinking”, and therefore included among his Kleinere Schriften. As best I can determine, the editors turned the “letter” into an “essay” by excising portions of the original letter, including references to Eugen Rosenstock and Viktor von Weizsäcker, which referred to a continuing discussion among members of Rosenzweig’s “group”. So much for the status of “letters” written to a particular person as against essays written not just to “someone”, but rather to “everyone”! Recall, for example, this sentence in “The New Thinking”: “But ‘speaking’ means speaking to someone and thinking for someone. And this someone is always a quite definite someone, and he has not merely ears, like ‘all the world,’ but also a mouth.”25 Rosenzweig’s “Germ cell” letter to Rudolf Ehrenberg takes on additional significance if one is aware that in the unpublished first part of the original letter Rosenzweig mentions “Rosenstock” and his “Cross of Reality” (Kreuz der Wirklichkeit) which Rosenzweig refers to as the “title of Rosenstock’s system, and his teachings about speech and language”. My reading of the published portion of the letter within the context of the unpublished first part suggests that Rosenzweig was referring to Rosenstock’s 26th November 1916 letter from their 1916 exchange (Letter 18), with which Ehrenberg might have been familiar, because Rosenzweig stated that he had sent his cousin a copy of his 1916 exchange with

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Rosenstock (Letter 463), and also because it is in that letter that our earliest known reference to Rosenstock’s use and explication of the term “Cross of Reality” appears. When I read Rosenzweig’s letter to Ehrenberg against the background of Rosenstock’s letter, the “Germ Cell” to the Star suggests that Rosenzweig had already incorporated in his “Rudi” letter many elements from Rosenstock’s own developing “Grammatical Thinking” or “Speech-Thinking”, which are the essential components of Rosenstock’s “Cross of Reality”.26 .

“Franz” and “Gritli” In a letter to Rudolf Ehrenberg (25th August 1919), Rosenzweig reflected on the conflict that he had experienced between the Jewish upbringing of his childhood and his “love affairs” (Liebeserlebnisse) with Christians (rather than with “Christian faith” per se), beginning with Hans Ehrenberg and his baptism in 1909, his meeting Rudolf Ehrenberg in 1910, and finally, Eugen Rosenstock in 1913; and said that, “These two threads converged in the Star and developed and grew together”, and then added, “But to mention only the two most important names: on the one hand, Hermann Cohen, and on the other, Gritli.” (The remainder of the letter is unfortunately unpublished.)27 However, the unpublished letters confirm that Margrit Rosenstock was a powerful influence, if not the driving force and power in Rosenzweig’s life during the six-month-period that it took him to write the Star and to relieve himself of the challenge to his full existence and identity represented by the various threads and forces that reverberated within him. Rosenzweig’s statement to his cousin, Rudi, “here Hermann Cohen, and there Gritli”, suggests that each, and certainly Rosenstock as well, was a force, a personality that informed and shaped Rosenzweig’s life at different periods and in quite distinct and unique ways. As we shall discover shortly, based on the unpublished letters, “Gritli” was indeed the fire and torch within him when he actually wrote the Star of Redemption. In a letter (6th November 1960) to his devoted admirer, archivist, and student, Georg Müller, after his wife’s death, Rosenstock-Huessy stated that, “The course of my spiritual person into the world is all too contrary ...” He then listed three dates: 1920: Rosenzweig as author of the Star 1923: Angewandte Seelenkunde 1925: Soziologie 1.

Later in the letter he writes:

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Chapter Seven But now comes a word of warning. You said that you wanted to clarify the story of the genesis of the Star. Has the hour already come for that today? In her article, Miss Emmet indicates the limits of your effort. I also warned her. As a result of your bold announcement, I looked yesterday, for the first time in my life, over the letters which Franz directed to my wife daily while he was writing the Star, and in which he reports on every page and every progress. He does speak of his ‘Eugenisation,’ but also says that the chapters II, 2; II, 3 originate from her. After forty years of patience, however, I may certainly ask my Pylades to apply the All Souls speech also to the bodily Trinity which was experienced at that time, and to recognise in individualistic analyses a primitivisation that would block comprehension. I don’t know if the hundreds of letters should ever be printed. Margrit, and at a certain point our faithful Anna, have saved these papers from the confusion of autumn 1918 up to today. So they really shouldn’t perish. But these letters are illuminated by the Star and, according to my existential sense, they are more important than the whole Star. May Beatrice be less important than the Divine Comedy—it is a serious question whether, in the century of existence and as Christians, we must not elevate faith above the “works.” And we had faith then, we didn’t think. You are perhaps the first person, yes, certainly the first, with whom I have spoken about these original relationships. Precisely because the Star’s origin from the Trialog can be proven in detail, your plan to commit yourself publicly without this Trialog makes me uneasy. You will be able to understand that without trouble. Truly—this loyalty also obliges me to tell you, what neither Altmann nor Emmet needed to know. Your Eugen.”28

In a letter to her husband (lst of June 1917), Margrit Rosenstock described her first meeting with Franz Rosenzweig while a guest in Kassel of Rosenzweig's mother, Adele. Rosenzweig had returned home on military leave late the previous evening after Margrit Rosenstock had retired; they met on the morning of the 15th. In her first letter to her husband about her meeting Rosenzweig it is clear that all three had, and indeed, would have much in common. She concluded her letter to her husband by saying, “A certain manner of regarding things, the general perspective, the metaphysical background, reminds me vividly of you. Further, he is certainly the friend who understands you best.” Although Margrit Rosenstock’s letters to Rosenzweig were destroyed, we know that she probably wrote her first letter to Rosenzweig on 4th October 1917, because in a “Dear Gritli” letter exactly one year later, Rosenzweig reminded her of the occasion. In a “Gritli” letter dated 1st June 1918, Rosenzweig reveals, or rather “confesses”, one aspect of the apparent “Trialog” that has developed during his relationship with Margrit and Eugen Rosenstock:

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My fear for Eugen himself is admittedly not less than it was then. I feel that I am unable to reach him at the moment. How is it when I look into myself? It is the exact complement of what you write yourself: I have never loved thus, without any creator’s feelings; I have never for a moment had the feeling with you, to have made something within you, to say nothing about you; I merely found you, quite finished, already made completely. And because after all you are already made, and someone must have made you, I have loved your creators in you, the heavenly one and the one on earth, Eugen. I sense their work in your completeness, without knowing anything about the details, the days of Creation, about “May” 1916. I could not add anything to that, nor did I want to. I was merely driven to give myself to you. The words come to me with difficulty. If I gave myself to you, the created one, without working on you—and only when one works at creating, does one make something one’s own—gave myself to you without any “feelings of ownership,” from you to me I think it is different. Perhaps not directly, directly it may happen similarly to you with me as to me with you. Indirectly, however, right through you, right through your created-by-Eugen-ness. I sense the power which has been working on me for years. You know how Eugen has torn at my roots: I don’t mean the theoretical things, nor the “coming to terms,” nor in any way anything articulable, but rather his humanity (Menschlichkeit). It is his humanity, without the confusing addition of the “disputatiousness,” that pours over me when your love gives itself to me. You are working on me, continuing Eugen’s creation in me, in fact, you are the one to complete it for the first time. Consider that I believe him without limits only since “I7th June” that I love him totally only since then. No, really, all that lies so close to the roots of life that I can hardly expose it with words. Even to you, only because you know it already.

Three weeks later in another “Gritli” letter (21st June 1918), Rosenzweig complains, “My heart is with Eugen, my words push forward toward him, but close to the goal, they recoil as from an abyss, rear up and refuse to jump across.” Two months earlier (23rd April 1918), Rosenzweig commented on Rosenstock’s role in his own awareness of the power of the spoken word: …I, however, certainly had a really private child’s religion; it has disappeared completely. Just as I came to speak, discovering at the same time, immediately, that one cannot speak without profaning oneself, that was when I first sensed the pains of loneliness, and to date, everything that has followed has been one single battle for the word that is true without profaning. To this day, you know that yourself. For years, the fields of knowledge seemed to me capable of becoming such a shy secret language, and so I dived into them. And Eugen was the first who showed me the way,

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And from another letter of the same day: Here is the place from Eugen’s letter of 1st April (that only reached me down here) as otherwise from that time you have only had the one word from him: ‘I am half-awake, the viola has paused, while the other two instruments are playing with yet more fire. When it has again heard and absorbed enough of both kinds, masculine and feminine, if it should be allowed to fill itself once again with all the tones from on high and on low, it will suddenly begin to resonate and rejoice like a boulder between the violin and the cello, to glorify God’s majesty. For is there another song, especially another song for us, for the three of us to sing?

Towards the end of June 1918 (26th June 1918), Rosenzweig announced to Rosenstock that he realised that he had now become so accustomed to speaking to him through “Gritli” that he had almost forgotten the simple reality that he could communicate with him directly, and added: So much has been stirred up again in our reciprocally interwoven fate; I know that elements which I long ago regarded as crystallised are for you moving free in solution. We must speak with one another again. After all, we cannot get away from each other. One of us can cause the other to grow rigid and obdurate, one can cause the other to become alive—but we can no longer twist apart the entangled knot of our constellations. Each of us has passed through the other’s circle of fire—perhaps you are only now passing through mine. Today’s isn’t the first word, merely the colon in front of it. The calendar has had to threaten, just to force out this foreword. Now it has forced it out, and I thank it for that—as I thanked it for the one thirty years ago. Due to this many-yeared solstice of the war, we can only experience as a surmise what it actually means to be thirty years old. But we cannot retreat from that any more—or from anything else ... Try to speak and to listen and believe in me as I believe in you. Your Franz.

In another “Gritli” letter in early July 1918, Rosenzweig stated that this year he had memorised all the important dates in her life including Eugen’s birthday, 6th July, and reminisced that in 1913 he hadn’t realised at the time that 7th July, “my Eugen day”, the day of their encounter, came right after Eugen’s natural birthday. This particular 6th July was especially significant for Rosenstock in Rosenzweig’s eyes because his friend had just turned thirty. Rosenzweig honoured the occasion by writing Rosenstock three separate letters. In one of them (24th July 1918), a quite

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long and interesting one (about 800 words), Rosenzweig spoke about their relationship, about scholarship, about language and faith, and also about such matters as the differences between a letter and a book. You have not written many letters to me that I would have understood before I answered them. A letter is certainly no book. A book must have been understood when one shuts it. A letter, however, doesn’t close with a period, but with the colon saying “answer.” And not until one has thrown oneself into this answer à corps perdu, not until then can one work forward to the point where the letter which one wanted to answer really ends— namely precisely at the end of the answer.

And from another portion of the letter, When we want to see each other, we always end up on the more comfortable path: we look at each other. For we are contemporary then. Written things are for “posterity,” the first generation of which is already advancing in the form of “students.” Despite this, over and over again we run the temptation of writing for one another; that is precisely the lasting token of our weakness, our “not-being-grown-up-yet.” We cannot and we need not forcibly forbid it to ourselves. For it forbids itself to us: by over and again experiencing that those “for” whom we thought we were writing do not want to hear us. The sum of my “wisdom of life for thirty-year-olds” is not taking this most difficult experience as a reason for despair, but rather as a symptom of recovery (for after all, every natural transition occurs in the form of sickness and recovery).

And then about matters of faith: Thereupon, you have been able to speak the language of your faith almost unconstrained, in the certainty that I would be able to translate it for myself. And the simple solution to the puzzle lies there. Our faith (and therefore our works as well) is different. If faith were something absolutely separate, we would really not be able to say a word to one another. Translation wouldn’t exist then as well. But faith is nothing without hope. And hope we have in common, both in the way our faith is different and because it is. The common property of hope enables me to translate your faith into my language. And therefore we can really speak of those things “of which it is worthwhile for men alone to speak.” You are utterly forgetful—or you would have recalled another line of poetry in which all this was said concisely and well: “My enemy in space, my friend in time.”

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Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) On several occasions, Rosenzweig expressed to Margrit Rosenstock not only his difficulty in reading Hermann Cohen’s work but also his finding himself, at times, in fundamental disagreement with Cohen. Four days before he began to write the Star he devoted most of a long “Gritli” letter (18th August 1918) to expressing his frustration and lack of sympathy with Cohen’s writings. I am reading Cohen’s logic diligently and nearly without understanding anything. He presupposes enormous amounts of mathematics and history of mathematics, and in addition, many contemporary opinions and everything only in allusions ... Overall he is strangely Hegelian, right down to the details, without knowing it. That’s precisely why I don’t have a very good meeting of the minds with him.... The circle of the 60s to the 80s, in which Cohen gained prominence, is already today very foreign to us and will hardly ever be of interest to us again. It is actually a miracle that he even became what he is, at that time. Because he really lived in that time, nourished himself from that time, and not from his own flesh as Nietzsche did.

Less than a week later (24th August 1918), when Rosenzweig had begun to write the Star, he said “Naturally it is not possible to read Cohen anymore. It is very funny how foreign to him are the directions in which my head is going, as soon as it is working on its own account.” In almost everyone of his “Gritli” letters, Rosenzweig comments on his progress with the Star and mentions having read two manuscripts by Rosenstock, “Sonne, Mond und Sterne” and one about “Amerika”. (Cf. Letters written on 25th, 26th and 27th August.) However, in his letter of 27th August 1918, he does mention incorporating in the Star some thoughts Cohen had about “revelation” that appeared in an article by Cohen published after his death. In his next letter of 28th August 1918, Rosenzweig indicates that the Rosenstocks are visiting his mother in Kassel and that Mrs. Cohen is probably there as well. Evidently, the Cohens and Rosenstocks knew and corresponded with one another. On 22nd August 1918, Rosenzweig began to prepare his outline for the Star. He wrote three letters that day that we know of: one to his mother which has been published (No. 559), and two long unpublished letters, one to Gritli, the other, to Eugen. In the portion of the letter to his mother he makes absolutely no reference to his beginning the Star. Given the concerns of this paper, Rosenzweig’s letter to Margrit Rosenstock is particularly informative. First, he probably began to draft his outline for the Star on the evening of the 21st. Second, he described the “impulse” to

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write finally the sequel to the “Rudi” letter, the Star, “for it is ‘Eugenising within me”. Dear Gritli, My expectation has been fulfilled. Admittedly not by you, but a letter from Eugen was there, an answer to the [drawing of a snail] letter. Therefore, and for another reason as well, I have had to think about it again and tried to read it again in the horribly shaky [from the train] draft! The other reason is that yesterday evening, in the hours just before the mail came, the continuation of the thoughts from last November’s letter to Rudi came to me just there, where the letter stopped then, and in vast bulk as well, but as yet contemplated with some mistrust; for it is “Eugenising” within me.

And with respect to the contrast in language between Parts One and Two of the Star, he includes many diagrams and states: In fact every star must be described in a language of its own, Hebrew, Latin, German—and that is how it happened in the first draft yesterday and today. The mathematising symbolic language of the letter to Rudi is only being kept for the beginning. Mathematics is after all the language before revelation. The language of mankind is first created in revelation. Therefore the points of the triangle of creation [drawing] can only be grasped mathematically; those of the triangle of revelation as well, when they, as is necessary here, are to be developed from the creation [drawing]. In the finished Star of Redemption, however, the words of mankind enter as replacement, for now revelation is there and the mathematical symbols are now no longer necessary for the points found so far.

Rosenzweig then goes on to discuss what has crystallised for him since writing the “Rudi” letter and mentions the “Gritlianum” that he had composed and sent to Margrit Rosenstock. It has also just now become clear to me that the doctrine of mankind sans phrase and palm branch is what is fruitful and new about the letter to Rudi, which also impressed you back then. [Rosenzweig concludes his letter, which is about 1,000 words in length, with]... To cut to the heart of the matter, the Gritlianum (that is its name, of course) suddenly occurred to me and I noticed that I have merely let the piece be replayed on the narrow stage of the microcosm, a piece which in reality is played on a large scale between mankind and the world in the triangle of creation. In a microcosm, that is seen microscopically, and thus with many things seen more intimately than with the naked eye, but at the same time many things seen without the context, the proper one just because they are microscopically isolated. Now I still want to write to Eugen.

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In his letter of the 22nd to Rosenstock, Rosenzweig expresses reservations about the importance of his undertaking. In its present shape it will be at most a practice exercise (Vorübung) or preliminary investigation (Voruntersuchung). He then launches into a discussion of the terms “Leib”, “Geist” and “Seele” and again refers to his “Gritlianum”: “What you call spirit without soul (entseelter Geist), I would have to call “disembodied,” “disincarnated” soul (entleibte, unleibhaftige Seele) in the language of the Gritlianum”.29 On the 23rd August Rosenzweig informs Margrit Rosenstock that he is working on preparations for the Star and is about to begin writing.

Rosenzweig’s Letter of 31st August 1918 to Margrit Rosenstock This letter is especially important for two reasons: First, Rosenzweig reveals for the first time his Plan, his outline of the Star. Second, he speaks about Hans Ehrenberg’s Die Parteiung der Philosophie and its possible influence on Part One of the Star. The outline for the Star that Franz sent Margrit Rosenstock is similar to the one he sent to Rudolf Ehrenberg four days later on 4th September except that in the earlier and first outline to “Gritli” he calls Teil III “Das Bild oder das Ewige” and the Einleitung, “Über die Möglichkeit, das Reich zu erbeten”, whereas in the outline to his cousin he refers to Teil III as “Die Gestalt oder das Ewige” and to the Einleitung as “Über die Möglichkeit, das Reich zu erkennen”. Three weeks later, he also sent an outline of the Star to Gertrud Oppenheim (25th September 1918). This version reads Teil III: “Die Gestalt oder das Ewige”, the same as in the “Rudi” letter, but the Einleitung reads “Das Reich und das Erkennen”. In all three letters, Rosenzweig’s conclusion, “Tor”, is missing. In the published edition, Rosenzweig calls Part III “Die Gestalt oder die Ewige Überwelt”, a change from the title in his earlier letters; and in his “Introduction” to Part III he reverts to his earlier usage of the word “erbeten” in his “Gritli” letter, rather than “erkennen”, which he used in the Ehrenberg and Gertrud Oppenheim letters. It is interesting that in a letter to Margrit Rosenstock the same day that he sent an outline of the Star to Rudolf Ehrenberg, Rosenzweig informed her of his decision to use “Gestalt” rather than “Bild” in the title for Part III. In the same letter, Rosenzweig announces to Margrit Rosenstock that he is going to perform an experiment; namely, to send a copy of the outline of the Star to Hans Ehrenberg, who had not read Rosenzweig’s “Rudi/Urzelle” letter (18th

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November 1917), in order to elicit his other cousin’s reaction. Rosenzweig adds that he has to “touch base” with Hans in any event, “because the ideas of his book (Parteiung der Philosophie) are running wild within me, and so I need to know from him whether I have understood him correctly”, especially since he intends to begin writing Part I the next day. He will include a copy of the Introduction to Part I, along with the outline, without any elaboration. It should be noted that Rosenzweig’s practice of exchanging letters, and then circulating certain ones among his Kreis, was essential to the shaping of the Star at every stage in its development. The “inner group” during this particular period consisted primarily of Margrit and Eugen Rosenstock and Rudolf and Hans Ehrenberg. The “outer circle” of the group, if one may be permitted to characterise it in this fashion, consisted of Gertrud Oppenheim, Adele Rosenzweig, and Viktor von Weizsäcker. These groupings reflect the role that these personalities played during this particular period in Rosenzweig’s life, based on the published as well as the new unpublished material. A copy of Hans Ehrenberg’s work, Die Parteiung der Philosophie was inscribed by him and sent to Rosenstock-Huessy in 1911.30 The subtitle of Die Parteiung is Studien wider Hegel und die Kantianer. The work is divided in two parts; the first is devoted to the internal logical problems between the two camps, and the second to the conflict between logic and philosophy. Each of the five chapters in the work is divided into three parts: “Hegel,” “Geschichte des Neukantianismus,” and “Die eigene Ansicht.” The work explores the possibility of creating an “isolated or independent logic”. My reading of this work suggests the strong possibility that Rosenzweig was influenced by Ehrenberg’s schemata and arguments when developing the structure and contents of Part I of the Star. Ehrenberg’s work draws heavily on the writings of Hermann Cohen, Hermann Lotze, Emil Lask, Ernst Kantorowicz, Edmund Husserl, on an earlier work of Ehrenberg’s, Kant's Kategorientafel und der systematische Begnff der Philosophie (1909), and last, on the writings of Jonas Cohn, the neo-Kantian philosopher, whose seminar Rosenzweig visited when stationed just outside Freiburg while writing the Star. Given the circumstances surrounding his writing the first draft—i.e., field military conditions; difficult access to libraries except when on leave or receiving material through the mail; the rapidity with which he wrote; and his frequent acknowledged use of the material of others, especially the works and ideas of close friends, it is to be hoped that some scholar will read Part I of the Star against the background of Ehrenberg’s work and also Jonas Cohn’s writings.

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At this juncture, it should be stressed again that not only should all available correspondence between Rosenzweig and Margrit and Eugen Rosenstock and the Ehrenbergs and others be made available, but the relevant correspondence between and among the members of Rosenzweig’s “circle” as well. To present Rosenzweig’s “Letters to Gritli” simply as love letters full of revelations about “the great man” as has been done, for example, with Kafka’s letters to Felice, or Rilke’s to Benevenuta, would do a disservice to all the parties involved. Valuable? Yes! Interesting reading? Definitely! Moving? Certainly! But their publication, without the accompanying correspondence of the other members of the “circle”— Eugen, Rudi, and Hans, and their letters to one another, especially those between Eugen and Margrit Rosenstock, could possibly distort and disfigure our understanding not only of Franz Rosenzweig, but of his relationship with Margrit Rosenstock and the relationship of both of them to Eugen Rosenstock during this period. It has surely become apparent that Rosenzweig was not writing only to Margrit Rosenstock, despite her presence in his life. We know, for example, that he regularly had his secretary send copies of portions of the Star to Eugen as well as to Gritli or through the latter to Eugen, often via the Huessy home in Säckingen, and that Rosenzweig regarded Eugen as his most severe, and at times, feared critic and antagonist. According to the information in the “Gritli” letters, copies of portions of the Star were also sent to both Hans and Rudolf Ehrenberg and occasionally to “Trüdchen” (Gertrud Oppenheim) and to Adele Rosenzweig. This process continued throughout the writing and revisions of the first draft of the Star and included discussions about the suitability of various publishers, the pros and cons of their offers, the size of the first edition, and even whether a limited number should be “colour co-ordinated” in their bindings.

Part II, Book 2, “Revelation, or the Ever-Renewed Birth of the Soul” Nowhere in the Star is Margrit Rosenstock’s influence on Rosenzweig more apparent than in “Part II, Book 2”. Rosenzweig’s correspondence with her during this period constitutes a diary, a narrative that is devoted to “love”, “the grammar and language of love”, and related human themes. Above all, it is here that the intensity of Rosenzweig’s relationship with Margrit Rosenstock is most forcefully and beautifully revealed. If any portion of the Star could be singled out to reflect the direct influence of Margrit Rosenstock on Rosenzweig’s thinking, based on Rosenzweig’s

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own testimony, then Part II, Book 2 is unquestionably the strongest statement. According to the letters, Rosenzweig completed his draft of Part II, Book 1 at the end of October 1918 and began Book 2 on or about 1st November. Fifteen days later (15th November 1918), he announced to Margrit Rosenstock: “II,2 is finished”. During that fifteen-day period Rosenzweig wrote ten letters to her plus a few prior to beginning Book 2 and several after completing it, some more than a year later, in which he writes of the importance of this section of the Star. In his letters during this period he not only discusses his work on the Star, but comments about life in Freiburg where he is stationed, his positive reaction to an article by Eugen, “Sonne, Mond und Sterne” that he is reading, his meeting Siegfried Kähler while attending a seminar given by Jonas Cohn, as well as his apprehension about the future of post-war Germany and Europe. The remarks that follow are taken almost exclusively from his “Dear Gritli” letters during this period. On the 28th October, Rosenzweig confesses his difficulty in beginning Book 2 because it touches on the most intimate of themes. “Up to now I haven’t written anything again, partly from being kept busy and partly from a sort of sense of shame; it is becoming the really indiscreet chapter, although in no way a confession.” On the 2nd November Rosenzweig compares the importance of this chapter to the “Gritlianum” that he had sent her earlier: “This Book, II, 2, on which I am now writing, belongs to you even more personally than the Gritlianum, precisely because it wasn’t destined for you from the beginning, and nor is it now. It is not to you but—yours. Yours—as I am. Sometimes it is to me as if I were a child that cannot write, but would very much like to, and you are guiding the pen. Keep on doing so, beloved.” After describing the reasonably comfortable quarters that he has rented for himself away from the military base near Freiburg, Rosenzweig says that after completing Part II, Part III will be much easier since it represents much that is already past history for him. When I have written part II and have started the third, rather then; for I am facing III, I, and III, 2 without excitement; they will be more or less just a description of stories long since old to me; the “doms” (die “tümer”) have become almost unimportant to me, particularly now that I am writing the Stern; not until III,3, will I feel the thrill that one senses in front of a veiled picture; for that’s when I must understand completely what I have actually done.

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Rosenzweig then mentions that his mother is planning to visit him and that he has thought of finding a sanatorium for her to stay at for the period of her visit where he could see her on Sundays. He adds that he has asked his secretary, Herr Mündel, to send a copy of the “Introduction” to Part II to Rosenstock and indicates that the thoughts in it came quite easily to him and that he was pleased with the results. In his next letter (8th November 1918), about 1,500 words in length, Rosenzweig begins his progress report on the Star by telling Margrit Rosenstock that: “The Star is admittedly at a point where all the writing of it is writing to you: you are constantly looking over my shoulder.” He then says that there is much more about the Star that he wants to share with her but can’t because there is too much to tell. But he does discuss the transition from Part II to III: The transition from II to III, I don’t mean the transition chapter, but rather the introduction for Rudi, is becoming clearer in detail; they are all quite simple thoughts, as simple as that of the miracle in the IInd introduction; did that not “enlighten” you as well? I mean, do you not also now have the feeling of knowing what a miracle is; that is how I feel.

And after some comments about Margrit Rosenstock’s sadness over Doris von Beckerath’s death, Rosenzweig says, “... you must live, you do not need to become old, none of us will become old; but you must still live”. Rosenzweig then talks about Rosenstock’s declaration in 1913 that Rosenzweig’s “Hegel book” should never be published in its then present form, and then reflects on a comment by Rosenstock to him about the probable effect of the Star on Rosenzweig’s life. “Eugen is right, the Star is snatching me across the abyss of time into the somewhere of a future. All that we do is far more seen before than we could ever foresee”. [A play on the German words “vorgesehen” (provided) “vorhersehen” (predict)]. Towards the end of the letter, Rosenzweig mentions that while Mündel is busy copying manuscript he, “Franz”, is reflecting on the effect that writing the Star is having on him. The quotation below is only a portion from this moving passage in which Rosenzweig talks about love, death and the will to live. I cannot despair; the * has a strong buoyancy and is holding me up above all waters; nothing written has ever affected me this way; admittedly there was never before in anything I wrote so much of my past and future life— not forgetting the present, always present either, you unforgettable, ever present. In everything else was only my past or my present or my future life.

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What you say about your childhood prayers is true. That is how it is in the *, or rather that is how it will be there; that belongs to the transition sections from II to III, which have become clear to me. When one can really pray it, one is prepared for death; for it is indeed part of piety, just as much as it is always part of love.

On 12th November 1918 Rosenzweig reported on his progress with the Star: I am working on the Star, forgetting things outside as long as I work; in between, however, I hardly think of it, so that I always have to find my way back into it first. This book will be quite something, after all; the previous one was wickedly difficult, this one is actually quite easy, but despite that, it would be sealed sevenfold for most people, and all the seals would no doubt be open only for you.

Frequently, Rosenzweig reiterates he did not know whether he was writing to Gritli or in fact, through her, to Eugen, hence, “To you (or doubtless to Eugen via your mouth)”, when, for example, he was agreeing with Rosenstock’s criticism of a key ingredient in Woodrow Wilson’s peace proposal. On the 13th November, Rosenzweig tells Margrit Rosenstock that he will complete Part II, Book 2 the next day, but that he is not really interested in the “art theory” part of it but will find a way somehow to weave it into his manuscript. He then discusses last year’s “Rudi letter” (Urzelle), reiterates the centrality of “factuality” (Tatsächlichkeit) or “facticity” in the plan of the Star, its significance vis-à-vis his rejection of German idealism, and how it even relates to Rosenstock’s thoughts about becoming a Roman Catholic. This paragraph also gives one a quite sensitive view of Rosenzweig’s estimate of his friend’s position as a Christian in these matters and his cousin’s, Rudolf Ehrenberg’s, as well. The whole * revolves around only the one concept of factuality (Tatsächlichkeit). Only the fact, the factum, frees one from the mere visio... If I were to want to rhyme with an -ism, that which Eugen and I ... want, it would be “factism”. But thank God, the German word “faith” exists for that. “Faith” is precisely what one cannot say for idealism. It has only become clear to me from Rudi’s letter, and then to be sure from Eugen’s to me as well, how close he continues to approach things Catholic. I could not write to him about that, as little as he could write to me about it sans phrase. In themselves, the two denominations are equivalent to me; perhaps that is precisely why “Volksstaat und Reich Gottes” (Hochland) did not make such an impression on me, because I had

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Chapter Seven long since seen the relationship of Catholic to Protestant that way, even if for other reasons. I see the question only in regard to Eugen. And there I would wish that he could be spared this jolt with all the inner hardenings, masks and constraints it (not because it is towards things Catholic, but because it is, in fact, a jolt) imposes on him. Look, basically Eugen only wants to sense more tradition, more obviousness, more “factuality” about him than has been found in Protestantism; and that he now hopes to find in Catholicism. In truth, however, he won’t find it there either (both churches are equally old—Paul and Peter! Think of the story about food in Acts). He cannot find it anywhere. One finds it only by having it, not by looking for it. If he had remained a Jew he would have found it. Now he has become a Christian, he should follow the logic of this step, which means: since he can never become a Christian from within, bound through tradition, he should become a free border-Christian, counting only when going his own way. He is effective and he is true precisely in his freedom, in his E.R.ness. The more dogmatically he appears, in religion as in politics, the less true he seems (and is, without his knowing it). If he really formally becomes a Catholic, he will have to dig himself in more deeply than anyone ever could. The situation is different in Rudi’s case because of his marriage. Most importantly, it would be the first time for him. Moving house once can happen to everyone and everyone lives through it. But the proverb “moving twice means burning up once” carries weight in the mental and spiritual world as well. Now I have brought out into the open something which was growing dully within me. This makes it clear to me as well.

The next day, 14th November, Rosenzweig was exhilarated by his progress: Dear Gritli, I am in such a good mood this morning because I am nearly finished with II, … I will never again write anything like this Book II, 2.

On the 15th, Rosenzweig wrote to Margrit Rosenstock, “II,2 is finished”. He was also quite pleased with Rosenstock’s article about Woodrow Wilson that appeared in the Roman Catholic journal, Hochland, and that his friend had settled the matter of choosing between Munich and Berlin by simply offering to contribute articles to Hochland rather than serve as co-editor. And then Rosenzweig makes some rather amusing comments about Rosenstock’s military service in Kassel: But look, even his brief activity in the Kassel soldiers’ council was sufficient for his name to enter the Volksblatt and thereby the memories of all politically interested people in Kassel, and naturally not as “Eugen Rosenstock”, but rather as “some sort of Dr. Rosenstein or Rosenzweig or –feld”—well, you know what I mean. That’s the way it goes.

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The letter concludes with a moving statement about Margrit Rosenstock’s involvement with the present chapter: My dear, 11,2 is so beautiful. I am looking forward to the hours in the Green Room, where I will be reading the important parts to you. This time first to you alone. As I am leaving it here to be copied, it may easily still take weeks. Actually you know it already, there is as much of you in it as of me.

Conclusion On 16th February 1919, Rosenzweig completed his first draft of the Star. During this period, letters flowed back and forth almost daily between Rosenzweig and Gritli in addition to those written to Eugen Rosenstock and Rudolf and Hans Ehrenberg, the other members of his “circle”. During this period, Eugen and Margrit Rosenstock, either together or separately, were often guests of Mrs. Rosenzweig in Kassel while Rosenzweig was away, just as Rosenzweig was a frequent visitor to the Huessy home in Säckingen high on a hill overlooking the Rhine on the German side, when Margrit Rosenstock was away. According to letters and statements from two of Margrit Rosenstock’s sisters, Rosenzweig thoroughly enjoyed his visits to Säckingen where he was treated as though he were a member of the family. Rosenzweig frequently went to Säckingen rather than Kassel when on leave even though Margrit and Eugen Rosenstock were living elsewhere. It is said that in Säckingen he found the peace and tranquillity he needed to do his work. We know for certain that a significant amount of the Star was, in fact, written at the Huessy home in Säckingen during his many visits. We also know that Margrit Rosenstock’s parents loved him and that her twin sisters looked forward to his visits and his reading of the classics to them. On the 13th February 1919, Rosenzweig wrote to Gritli that he was leaving the next day for Säckingen. He said that he had just completed Part III, Book 3, and was quite pleased with it. The next day, the 14th, he wrote that he was in Säckingen and staying in her sister Marliese’s room. To give a sense of his relationship to the Huessy household at the time he completed the Star in Säckingen, I quote from his letter: Marthi was wearing her hair up today, so I had to look at her all the time, because she resembled you sometimes for moments. But I knew over and over again: it wasn’t you. It may also have been because I am living in Marliese’s room again and your desk upstairs was closed when I dashed up

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Chapter Seven once; I took heart, however, and asked your mother for the key, and then I saw that she really had expected me to go up there, for she said that she had had the room upstairs heated. I would not have enjoyed writing “Tor” down here if the desk had been upstairs and closed to me. Renouncing little things is much more difficult than big ones. Have you not noticed that as well? ... The twins sang, accompanied by lutes which were out of tune, but it was very lovely anyway, and then accompanied by their mother’s piano. Your father is quite well again. I read act I of The Meistersinger. Now I want to work at correcting the rest of III,3.

On the 15th February he wrote that he had spent the day reading aloud the Meistersinger and had completed eight pages of the “Tor” (Gate). He added that although everyone was very charming he felt somewhat uncomfortable and thought perhaps that he ought not to have come to Säckingen to finish the Star. On 16th February 1919, the day he completed his first draft of the Star, Rosenzweig wrote: Dear Gritli, It has turned 12, and I have read all of Hamlet aloud. Two letters from you arrived after dinner. I have finished Tor. I had always thought that finishing the * would to me be worth a telegram to you. But then, when it happened today, I didn’t feel like telegraphing. I didn’t like it enough. It’s true that I have already improved all sorts of things and will probably still be improving more tomorrow morning. But the real, released feeling of being finished is not there. However, it’s not missing because I’m sad that this lodger is now moving on; rather, through the whole IIIrd part, things haven’t been right anymore. While writing the Ist and IInd parts I had the feeling of writing something lasting, now I don’t have that feeling anymore. Perhaps I’m mistaken. But I don’t, for example, have the inclination to copy the end for you, although it may be April before I have Mündel’s copy.

But two days later, on the 18th February, he wrote that he had obtained a copy of the conclusion from Mündel in order that Gritli could absorb it with her own eyes and ears. These are the concluding words from the Star of Redemption that were written by Franz Rosenzweig during his stay at Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy’s home in Säckingen. More than likely, they were written by Rosenzweig sitting at Margrit RosenstockHuessy’s writing table in her room on the third floor of the Huessy home overlooking the Rhine.

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To walk humbly with thy God—nothing more is demanded there than a wholly present trust. But trust is a big word. It is the seed whence grow faith, hope, and love, and the fruit which ripens out of them. It is the very simplest and just for that, the most difficult. It dares at every moment to say truly to the truth. To walk humbly with thy God—the words are written over the gate, the gate which leads out of the mysterious-miraculous light of the divine sanctuary in which no man can remain alive. Whither, then, do the wings of the gate open? Thou knowest it not? INTO LIFE.31

Harold M. Stahmer is Professor Emeritus of Religion, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA.

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ADDENDUM TO FRANZ ROSENZWEIG’S LETTERS TO MARGRIT ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY, 1917-1922 HAROLD M. STAHMER (AS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE LEO BAECK INSTITUTE YEAR BOOK XXXIV, 1989)

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EAR READER:

In 1986, Professor Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik invited me to present a paper about the unpublished letters from Franz Rosenzweig to Margrit Rosenstock (-Huessy) on the occasion of the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) in Cassel, Germany. The title of my paper was “The Letters of Franz Rosenzweig to Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy: ‘Franz’, ‘Gritli’, ‘Eugen’ and “The Star of Redemption,” and appeared in Der Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig (18861929), Band I, Edited by Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, (Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg/Munchen, 1988). A slightly revised and extended version of my 1986 paper—with English translations of the German citations and quotations—appeared a year later in the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book XXXIV (1989). Other relevant publications include: Harold Stahmer, “‘Speech-letters’ and ‘Speech-thinking’: Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy” (Modern Judaism, February, 1984); “‘Sprachbriefe’ und ‘Sprachdenken’: Franz Rosenzweig und Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy,” Berliner Theologische Zeitschrift (BthZ) (3. Jahrgang, Heft 2, 1986) ; Friedrich Niewöhner, “Franz Rosenzweig in Neuer Sicht: Die Edition als Manipulation des Lesers,” (Tel Aviv Jahrbuch für Geschichte, 1986); and The essays by Alexander Altmann and Dorothy Emmet, and Harold Stahmer’s “Introduction” to Judaism Despite Christianity: “The Letters on Christianity and Judaism between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig,” Edited by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (University of Alabama Press, 1969, and Schocken Press, 1971); and Michael GormannThelen’s and Harold Stahmer’s biographical entry about “Eugen

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Rosenstock-Huessy” in the Theologische Realenzyklopädie (TRE), Band XXIX, (Walter de Gruyter, 1998), pp. 413-418. Because English is the native language of most of my colleagues, I enclose a copy of my Leo Baeck essay along with a letter from the late Alexander Altmann that he sent me after reading my 1986 Cassel paper.

Brandeis University 126 Glen Ave. Newton Center, MA 02159 February 3, 1987 Dear Professor Stahmer: Thank you very much for your letter of January 22 and for sending me a copy of your paper. I read it with rapt attention and sincere appreciation. By presenting the most relevant Gritli letters and by placing them in context you have fully substantiated your claim that the hitherto suppressed material is of vital importance for understanding the genesis of Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption. It comes, of course, as a shock to realise that a profound erotic involvement with Eugen Rosenstock’s wife played such role in this process of intellectual crystallization. Though Rosenstock considered it uncalled-for to let Miss Emmet and me know the background, your revelations pave the way for a new interpretation of the Star which should now be undertaken. I myself would have wished to try my hand at it in light of the entire epistolatery material extant**, but at my age one shouldn’t be that ambitious. It is clear to me, however, that the Star has to be read with those letters in mind. I am not surprised that those who have tried to interpret it in the past are somewhat reluctant to admit the importance of the newly discovered material. It is equally clear to me that Rosenzweig’s immense indebtedness to Eugen has been substantiated beyond any doubt by what you quoted. I hope your paper will be published in full in the Kassel Proceedings. Should this prove technically impossible, perhaps the Journal of Religion or the Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte (which accepts papers in English) would be the place for it.

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On p.3 read: “Dear Gritli” (not “Dearest”). On p.4 read: Immerwährend. On p. 13 “Brief # 463 should read: letter #463 for the sake of uniformity. Twice I found the misspelling Rüdi instead of Rudi. With warm regards I am Yours sincerely, Alexander Altmann ** (shedding light, as it does, also on Rosenzweig’s relationship to Hans Ehrenberg and, above all, to Eugen R.)

CHAPTER EIGHT THE GREAT GIFT— THE IMPACT OF FRANZ ROSENZWEIG’S JEWISHNESS ON EUGEN ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY WAYNE CRISTAUDO

F

ROSENZWEIG’S FRIENDSHIP with Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy commenced when Rosenzweig became his student. But the main event that is mentioned in every biographical account of their relationship is their heated conversation of 1913 on science and religion, inspired by Selma Lagerlöf’s novel, The Miracles of the Antichrist. In that discussion Rosenstock-Huessy’s apology for prayer and worship became the catalyst for Rosenzweig’s opening himself up to the living God and the primacy of speech over the mind. While this is invariably hailed—as it was by the two participants themselves—as the turning point in Rosenzweig’s life, his letters and diary entries demonstrate that, since his youth, he had been groping for just the kind of way into “faith-thinking” that RosenstockHuessy showed was possible. By the time the two began corresponding again in 1916, Rosenzweig had become, by remaining, a Jew. Unknown to himself at the time, he was also on the way to becoming the author of the Star of Redemption. But, as is also evident from the letters of 1916, it is highly unlikely that he would have written the Star without Rosenstock-Huessy’s influence. As Alexander Altmann rightly noted in his essay, “Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy: An Introduction to their ‘Letters on Judaism and Christianity’,” Rosenzweig’s deployment of the Jewish and Christian calendar in the third part of the Star is an application of RosenstockHuessy’s “philosophy in the form of the calendar” (this is a methodological key to Out of Revolution and Die Europäischen Revolutionen).1 What is even more striking is just how many of the Star’s most important themes about the Jew, the Christian, and the pagan are RANZ

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aired in the correspondence that took place between Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy in 1916. These fundamental themes include the Christian hatred of the Jews for their stubbornness;2 Christianity’s role as a force for Judaizing pagans;3 western civilization as a form of Johannine Christianity;4 Rosenzweig’s critique of Islam;5 the Jews as the eternal people who live in God’s truth and are the goal and the Christians being the people ever on the way6; and the danger and value of movements that attempt to take “the Kingdom by force.”7 We also read there that: The art of the Synagogue does not enter into living relation with other art, nor Jewish theology with Christian theology … but Jewish art and theology, taken together, build up the Jews into a united whole and maintain them in their form of life … only then do they work as a ferment on Christianity and through it on the world.8

We also find the idea upon which Rosenzweig’s entire take on the relationship between Jews and Christians rests and which, as will be discussed in detail below, convinced (and would be taken up again by) Rosenstock-Huessy: the Jew as the “guarantee of the reality of that Christian world.”9 All these ideas appear in 1916 as responses to provocations by and engagements with Rosenstock-Huessy. Generally, with some few exceptions, studies on the 1916 correspondence rarely discuss the subsequent effect of that dialogue upon Rosenstock-Huessy. More often than not, the exchange has been read by people in a partisan manner and Rosenstock-Huessy is portrayed as an apostate hell-bent on converting his friend.10 At its most hyperbolic, and without a shred of evidence, Rosenstock-Huessy, the son of Jews and whose mother committed suicide during the war, an act he directly linked with National Socialism, has been interpreted as anti-Semitic.11 But I think a recollection by Rabbi Marshall Meyer, a former student of Rosenstock-Huessy’s, given in 1988 at a conference celebrating the centenary of Rosenstock-Huessy’s birth, tells the real story of his intention and effect. What is also astonishing about it is that Rosenstock-Huessy succeeded in repeating with his student Meyer what he had previously done with Rosenzweig—opening up his heart and mind to Judaism: I learned more about Judaism and about faith in God from Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy than I had learned from my rabbis in my small town in Norwich, Connecticut. I felt the Spirit with its colossal radiations, vibrations, and reverberations through centuries and millennia, from the mouth of the Jew Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, who converted to Christianity, who found his way in Christianity, who so challenged me that I couldn’t defend my Judaism. I knew nothing about it. I had read a couple

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of dozen, maybe fifty books, in English. I knew little or no Hebrew. And I was so driven by Eugen, and so compelled by his classes, and fell so much in love with him, and felt such ambivalence toward him, so much of what was more than compensated for, by the loving, understanding of Margrit, with whom I spent so much time in Four Wells.12

The dialogue of 1916 was vigorous and often caustic, being carried out by two young friends who were expressing their life’s purpose, as each saw it. Each felt called to place his whole soul in service to the living God, and each responded to the other with an all-or-nothing sincerity. Significantly though, while Rosenzweig was the one who complained most about how Rosenstock-Huessy did not take him sufficiently seriously or was abusing him, it was Rosenzweig who initially goaded RosenstockHuessy into expressing himself on the matter of Jews and Christians. And Rosenzweig is certainly no more well-mannered than Rosenstock-Huessy. Both were often blunt in their expression. Both were talking at that time to each other in private. The tone of the dialogue is the tone of friends in conflict about the most important of things—their own souls. RosenstockHuessy, who was a soul of fire, never considered that the letters could be interpreted as anti-Semitic—had he done so, he would have hardly gone to such lengths to publish them after the Second World War. It beggars belief that someone would seriously suggest that Rosenstock-Huessy wanted to be remembered in history as the anti-Semitic correspondent of the century’s greatest Jewish thinker. In fact Rosenstock-Huessy’s other writings on Jews and Christians attempt to counter anti-Semitism. But it is astonishing that his critics simply neglect to mention that in 1935, he returned to Berlin from America, and visited the publishing house issuing Edith Rosenzweig and Ernst Simon’s edition of Rosenzweig’s Letters. The visit was undertaken to provide a preface to the section devoted to the 1916 correspondence.13 Of course, in 1935, to highlight this Jewish-Christian dialogue was an important political statement. That is, it was an attempt to counter antiSemitism by trying to awaken German Christians out of their slumber and complicity with the Nazis, by alerting them to the fact that, in spite of all their differences, Christians and Jews are both required to serve the living God. This, at least, is manifestly obvious from Rosenstock-Huessy’s 1935 preface, where he opens his introduction with a deliberate reference to the 1933 work of Karl Barth, Theological Existence Today. In it, RosenstockHuessy says that the correspondence concerns itself with the “eternal, typical suprapersonal questions of existence of Jews and Christians in the midst of the nations of the world (Völkerwelt) regarding their ‘theological existence today’.”14

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In light of Rosenstock-Huessy’s generally negative assessment of Barth, it seems obvious that he is saying that this correspondence between a Christian and a Jew is the question of the hour . Barth, of course, was to refuse to return to Germany in that same year, thus refusing to sign his oath of allegiance to Hitler. However, in 1933 he had disappointed Dietrich Bonhoeffer by his wait-and-see approach to the Aryan Clause imposed upon the Confessing Church. That clause required the Church to commit itself to the doctrine of blood and race, thereby excluding Jews from the Church.15 Although Barth’s post-Holocaust conclusion of the relationship between Jews and Christians ends up being similar to that of both Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy, it is, I think true to say that Barth’s attitude to the Jews is, as Michael Wyschogrod has argued, “ambivalent.”16 For his part and for the remainder of his life, Rosenstock-Huessy devoted himself to demonstrating the importance of the formulation that he had expressed in Germany in 1935. That was also why, once in America, he was so insistent that the letters be published in a volume in their own right, something he eventually achieved in 1968 with Judaism Despite Christianity. In fact, almost as soon as he arrived in America Rosenstock-Huessy had wanted to see this correspondence published, believing, as he did, that it still spoke to the most pressing concerns of the time. After the war he repeatedly asked Edith Rosenzweig if she would consider publishing the material. But having consulted several Jewish scholars, including Martin Buber, she thought that the material was too explosive after the Holocaust and could be misconstrued as anti-Semitic.17 It hardly needs repeating that had Rosenstock-Huessy stayed in Germany, he too would have ended up in a camp: His mother and father and brothers and sisters were all of Jewish “blood.” National Socialism was not interested in Jewishness as a faith, but as a blood matter—in this it concurred, in the demonic manner of the reversal of the truth, with Rosenzweig, who also held that Judaism was a blood matter.18 But it is true to say that many of Rosenzweig’s Jewish readers believed, with good reason, that the Holocaust was just one further illustration of Christian persecution. The persecution they could point to had gone back to early synods and the Christian Roman Imperium, backed up by many major figures in the history of the Church, from Origen of Alexandra, to St. Cyprian, to St. Gregory of Nyssa, to Augustine, to St. John of Chrysostom, and repeated in Germany by Luther’s shameful and horrific text, On the Jews and Their Lies. For his part, Rosenstock-Huessy never thought the Church was compatible with anti-Semitism. As I elaborate below, he saw Jewish persecution as pagan and in complete contradiction to the teachings of Christ.19

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In several letters in the correspondence with Margrit RosenstockHuessy, Rosenzweig is angry with Eugen for not adequately taking his Jewishness seriously. There are also several such letters to Eugen himself in the 1916 correspondence. In Ephraim Meier’s study of the letters to Margrit, these comments of anger by Rosenzweig are framed in such a way that Rosenzweig appears a victim to a kind of Svengali figure. Rivka Horwitz adopts a similar position. This is, I think, rather stretching things. The tone between the friends is, to repeat, unrelenting in its forcefulness and highly critical of what the other is doing. And it is just as extreme in the offence and insults slung out. But it is by both, to both. Neither had any compunction in saying what they thought the other should do. Thus, for example, Rosenstock-Huessy tells Rosenzweig either not to marry, or to marry a pagan, while Rosenzweig urges Margrit to raise her son Hans as a pagan rather than as a Christian. To my mind, and as I read their correspondence, Rosenzweig is far more thin-skinned and more given to petulance and rather churlish comments than Rosenstock-Huessy, who tends to brush off Rosenzweig’s “strikes” with humor and a tease, while somewhat bullishly advancing his case. Thus, to Rosenzweig’s provocation that the Jews had crucified Jesus and “we in the whole wide world”20 would do it again every time, Rosenstock-Huessy responds: “You would not crucify Jesus of Nazareth—you alone in the wide world. Believe me this. Eugenes (the well born) Kakoethes (the ill-mannered one).”21 My assessment of the encounter, for what it is worth, is that Rosenzweig was somewhat in awe of Rosenstock-Huessy, and not surprisingly found him overbearing at times and, in spite of Rosenzweig’s greater age, too close a father figure for comfort. But the idea that Rosenstock-Huessy could not rest until he had converted Rosenzweig just does not square with anything we actually find in Rosenstock-Huessy. His two “litanies” of 1916, which were meant to seal the conversation, reach exactly the same conclusion about the “common front” of Jews and Christians, which has been so widely applauded by readers of the Star. However, Rosenstock-Huessy adds a Christian inflexion: “God is the Cross and is David’s Star” and “The Christian realm, the Sanctum of the Jews / Are one, though two figures of the spirit.”22 Even in the correspondence of 1916, Rosenstock-Huessy not only waits for Rosenzweig to raise the issue of his having become a religious Jew, but also is far more interested in showing Rosenzweig the progressive achievements of Christianity and the extent to which Christianity has shaped the world. To Rosenstock-Huessy, showing those things is far more important than having Rosenzweig agree with him.

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Significantly, the historical role of Christianity in transforming the world is not a point with which Rosenzweig disagrees. Indeed it will become a key point of emphasis in Rosenzweig’s interpretation of the meaning of Christianity—what he does not accept is that the Jews should be eliminated from the story because they are extrinsic to history. Being extrinsic to history, which makes the Jews ever a “remnant,” is precisely for Rosenzweig the intrinsic importance and truth of the Jews as the eternal people. In 1916 there is dispute in some important details about the Jew visà-vis the pagan, with Rosenstock-Huessy being reprimanded by Rosenzweig for placing the Jew and the pagan on the same plane, for misunderstanding the nature of Abraham’s sacrifice.23 Rosenstock-Huessy accepted that he had been mistaken, for after 1916 he never again made that equation, and he referred thereafter to the sacrifice of Abraham always positively. Rosenzweig also makes the all-important point, which he will repeat in the Star, and which Rosenstock-Huessy will also come to accept, that the Christian is always a pagan at birth. That “man was created as a pagan by birth, and a Christian by death,” is repeated by RosenstockHuessy in The Cross of Reality. But what is more significant is how he used this idea as the platform of his life’s work in demonstrating how the pagan at birth is so important for understanding the Christian act of rebirth, and how the various forms of social existence have to play themselves out before Christianity can find a place in the world. Rosenzweig’s Star was fundamental in Rosenstock-Huessy’s formation. This was a point Rosenstock-Huessy emphasized to Georg Müller in 1960, when he listed three dates that marked “the course” of his entrance as a “spiritual person into the world.” The first date was “1920: Rosenzweig as author of the Star”; the second was 1923, when he wrote Angewandte Seelenkunde (Practical Knowledge of the Soul); and the third, 1925, when he wrote the first volume of his Soziologie.24 Given the closeness, then, between Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy, it is somewhat surprising that Rosenzweig’s readers have failed to notice not only the extent to which Rosenstock-Huessy is influenced by Rosenzweig, but that more than any other thinker he actually carries forward Rosenzweig’s ideas, expanding on the project that is set out in Rosenzweig’s The New Thinking and exhibited so powerfully in the Star and Rosenstock-Huessy’s studies of revolution (Out of Revolution and Die Europäischen Revolutionen) and his two-volume Soziologie. The orthodox interpretation of the 1916 correspondence by Rosenzweig scholars is that Rosenstock-Huessy’s motivation was the conversion of his friend, and no doubt due to Rosenzweig’s own

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emotional turmoil in the challenges put to him by Rosenstock-Huessy (and, so often, answered with brilliance and offering new perspectives not considered by Rosensock-Huessy). But Rosenstock-Huessy’s account suggests another interpretation entirely. Rosenstock-Huessy did not see the dialogue as a failure because he had not converted his friend. Instead, Rosenzweig’s refusal to be swayed was accompanied with provocations and challenges that were a great gift. It seems obvious to me that he knew this even in 1916, and that he conveyed it to Rosenzweig by comparing their relationship to that between Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Kant, he says, … collaborates in all his own work unconsciously with his opposite number, his spiritual better half who he knows is at work at the same time. All of Kant’s “Critiques” acquire a bright gleam of illumination only if one sees that his (sic) vis-à-vis, i.e. Rousseau, doesn’t lie in an abandoned corner of his mind but is his equal; nay, as in every proper marriage, his better half. This half, of whom one secretly dreams, but with whom one cannot treat if one is writing for a school and for school children who have lessons they must learn—this half in Kant’s case is there, and consciously there.25

What is being said here of Kant and Rousseau is not only a very thinly veiled expression of Rosenstock-Huessy’s deep appreciation of Franz Rosenzweig, but an expression of how both saw the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. That is to say, Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig reached an agreement about Judaism and Christianity before the Star was written, that this was celebrated by Rosenstock-Huessy in his poem “Eugenius Francisco Salutem,” included within the Epilogue to Judaism Despite Christianity. Rosenstock-Huessy would not only refer to it continuously throughout the rest of his life, it would shape his life’s work. In this respect, it is quite remarkable how prescient Rosenzweig was in 1918 when in the midst of a letter to Margrit, he is really irritated at what he clearly considers to be more baiting from Eugen. He writes: “He became fate for me earlier than I did for him. But is it not natural that I also had to become it for him?”26 In the “Prologue / Epilogue to the Letters—Fifty Years Later,” published in Judaism Despite Christianity, Rosenstock-Huessy would sum up the whole issue of the common ground between him and Rosenzweig on the Jewish / Christian relationship: Much nonsense has piled up about this “existential” correspondence. Some people speak of it as though it turned Eugen into a Jew, away from his Christian faith, and over the years some very foolish letters have been

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The outcome of the dialogue that took place, then, had been a demonstration not only of their respective commitments, which neither wished to surrender, but the value of their difference, and the impact that difference had upon their own development. Had Rosenzweig become a Christian, this would have been a far less powerful and important truth for Rosenstock-Huessy than the fact that he saw what power and truth Christianity contained, and yet he refused to convert to it. Thus his Judaism was much more than that of someone who merely accepted it without understanding Christianity not only as a temptation, but as an enemy that was also a divinely sanctioned partner. Likewise, that Rosenstock-Huessy remained a Christian, in spite of his accepting the truth of Rosenzweig’s provocations, was far more authentically Christian and valuable for Christianity as a social power than any so-called Christian gestures that are undertaken in ignorance, derogation, or outright hostility to Judaism. Had Rosenzweig converted or had Rosenstock-Huessy returned to the faith of his forefathers, the living truth that had been manifest in both lives would have been something less. Rosenstock-Huessy was not being facetious, but was truthfully drawing attention to Rosenzweig’s biographical development when he claimed that his own journey into Christianity had contributed to Rosenzweig’s awakening to his own Jewish faith. Rosenstock-Huessy believed that Rosenzweig was reactivated in his own tradition because of a central component of Christianity’s historical mission of resurrecting imperiled, spent, or lost forms of life. But what he learned from Rosenzweig was that the Jewish form of life was always waiting there—it alone of all past life ways did not need to be reconstituted on the basis of the redemptive path of love of the neighbor, because that was, to take an expression used by Rosenzweig for the ideas that would first come to flower in the Star of Redemption, the “germ cell” of Judaism. Nevertheless, Rosenzweig did not—indeed, could not—deny that he had awoken to Judaism through his engagement with Christianity, and that had he personally been left alone in a liberal culture whose major thought ways had been shaped by idealism. And had his cousins and RosenstockHuessy not showed him how one could reconcile great intelligence with faith, he may well never have taken that step that made him who he was. No matter, then, how much Rosenstock-Huessy at times might have wanted Rosenzweig to join him in his Christian faith. He well knew that

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the ways of one’s will and the ways of God are utterly different; faith in the self’s will is simply demonic, because it is the enclosure of the self at the expense of the Spirit that moves life.28 By Rosenstock-Huessy not having his way, and because of the other’s provocations and interrogations, each was drawn against his will into an ever deeper awareness of the meaning of his own faith, as well as the meaning of what these faiths meant for the world as a whole. As his Epilogue in Judaism Despite Christianity also makes amply clear, Rosenstock-Huessy was particularly proud of the fact that their respective faiths had also given birth to a common ground that had overcome their separation. He termed it the third act or postscript to the 1913 and 1916 engagements (the first two acts). This occurred in 1920 and when Rosenzweig had insisted to the historian of Judaism, Rudolf Hallo, that the community of all those who confess, against those who merely think timelessly, embraces all believers: “Sprache ist doch mehr als Blut”(speech is more than blood). [Franz Rosenzweig, Briefe (Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1935), Nr. 339, October 6, 1929.]”29 According to Rosenstock-Huessy, Hallo had been “toying with baptism,” under Rosenstock-Huessy’s influence, but had then become quite fanatical in his Judaism and his high-ranking role in the Jewish Lehrhaus. Confronted by the excessive zeal of his reconverted Jewish friend, Franz declared: The walls have fallen. Where we met, where Eugen and I met, no antiquated walls separate man and man . . . “For those who have awakened the cosmos has become a community” (Herakleitos). Our communion— which I tried to resist between 1913 and 1917—is safe. Judaism, Christianity, Creation: what has happened to us with regard to all three is the living faith, and no [mere] orthodoxy can chain this stream of life, which must achieve our resurrection from the cemeteries of Germany and of Europe. How the shape of this resurrection may look, is no proper cause for worry. We have to live it.30

And to Eugen’s wife Margrit, Franz wrote on June 15, 1920: It is a great act of mercy that God once has uprooted me out of life during my life. From July to September 1913, I was quite willing to die—to let everything within myself die. But this may not be made into a rule. Most men simply live their life’s fate, or destiny, and nothing more. It is the extraordinary in us that God, in our case, has not only spoken to us through our lives; in addition he has made the life around us fall down like a theatrical decoration, and on the empty stage he has spoken to us. We have

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Rosenstock-Huessy saw himself and Rosenzweig as opponents who were, nevertheless, allies in a common war against what both saw as the dark side of the triumph of humanism. Hence when asked by the Swiss theologian Emil Blum to write a few words on Rosenzweig’s death for a new work, Rosenstock-Huessy replied: “Franz Rosenzweig and I have a common life-work to achieve. I can’t take my leave of him by means of an obituary simply because he happened to die.” In his abrasive “Prologue / Epilogue” he states that the “real event” of the letters was the shared perception / conviction “that the ‘objectivity’ swindle—swindle is perhaps too kind a word, since it implies that the culprits at least know what they are doing—was seen in its murderous impact upon the Western World.”32 What, he continues, united the Jew and the Christian was the havoc caused by their common enemy, “the self-styled ‘humanists’ of all descriptions and dispensations.” The “idols” served are, according to RosenstockHuessy: “relativism (in which not even Einstein believed), ‘objectivity’ (largely spurious at best), abstract and nameless statistics.”33 For Rosenstock-Huessy, “objectivity” and relativism are two sides of the one modern coin, a coin forged in the humanist spirit where the God pole of reality has become meaningless. In its insistence upon its discovery of the truth (the truth of the all is one [Spinoza] or the all rests upon the I’s selfcertainty [Descartes]), modern philosophy’s point of departure has been to lock in a shrunken understanding of the spirit. Modernity is a great contradiction, consisting of the unprecedented technological and administrative harnessing of corporeal powers, on the one hand, and, on the other, a plethora of souls in disintegration, the weakened personalities of men and women who are “no longer [being] certain of the sources of integrity.”34 The battle, then, that Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy were respectively fighting as Jew and Christian involved fighting against Humanism’s naturalistic view of the world. This fight also involved not succumbing to the humanist typography that would make Jew and Christian and pagan all one. This particular endeavor was one that Rosenstock-Huessy brought up in several instances, including a separate essay in the 1940s, “Die jüdischen Antisemiten oder die akademische Form der Judenfrage” (Jewish Anti-Semitism or the academic form of the Jewish question), the German version of which is included in Das Geheimnis der Universität (the secret of the university), where he also underscores how tempting it was for intellectual Jews to embrace humanism as part of their desire to break away from their Jewish origins.

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Judaism to show the full extent of their Humanist credentials. It was Rosenzweig, as he himself says, in “Jewish anti-Semitism,” that had first shown him that we could never understand our past, present, or future if we did not comprehend that the Jew, Christian, and pagan were three fundamentally different and irreducible grounds of appeal. These grounds of appeal led to different but essential ways of world and self-making.35 Each of the three, he says, is an eternal vessel for the one Spirit that was something more than mechanical life. But dissolution of each into a common human is part of the triumph of the mechanical orientation of life. In fact, this upholding of Rosenzweig’s triadic distinction against its Humanist dissolution had been concerning him since the 1920s in his struggle against nationalism, Fascism, and Bolshevism—that is, the modern humanistic forms of political organization that were so dangerous for Germany after the First World War. It is also indicative of how strongly he was motivated by Rosenzweig, such that he, a Jewish apostate, would be attuned to the alternative form of apostasy—the conversion to secularism. This is central to his writing of 1924, the “Dismantling of Political Lies,” where he had argued that the Prussian apostate and conservative Friedrich Julius Stahl, the French republican Léon Gambetta, and Karl Marx were all Jews who had embraced the “ultra” positions of modern social / political life in their eagerness to distance themselves from the synagogue. For Stahl it was ultra-statism; for Gambetta, ultranationalism; and Marx, ultra-socialism.36 As Rosenstock-Huessy writes in Out of Revolution, perhaps a little too hyperbolically, Marx had written “the greatest libel against the Jews ever published in any language by any anti-Semite, in his attempt to disclaim his Jewishness.”37 The “Dismantling of Political Lies” also points out that Hitler and Erich Ludendorff seemed to have no idea how their own anti-Semitic burning desire for revenge had been ensconced in a triadic fusion of nationalism, statism, and socialism, each of which had had Jews as leading figures of the movements. Jews had been among the most prominent leaders of these isms because they were desperately seeking to break free themselves from their own Jewish heritage through their embrace of nation, or state, or socialism. Each component of those -isms had had Jews among their most prominent leaders, desperately seeking to break free themselves from their own Jewish heritage through their embrace of nation, or state, or socialism. The more general point of the essay, evident in its very title, was the need to expose and dismantle the political lies that had grown up in post-War Germany, and hence to prevent that alliance of nationalism, statism, and socialism from driving the suicidal wish of Europe. The essay resonated with themes that had been developed in an

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even earlier essay of 1919, “The Suicide of Europe,” in which RosenstockHuessy had also coupled Jews and Christians. Here he repeated (as he would do on numerous occasions) Rosenzweig’s story from the 1916 correspondence (also repeated in the Star)—when Frederick the Great remarked that there was not the slightest evidence for the truth of Christianity, a pastor had retorted that the Jews were the proof of its truth. He had also made another point that would find itself repeated throughout his life, that nationalism and paganism had conspired in the nineteenth century to destroy both Judaism and the Church.38 This point was taken up again in 1944 in a letter to his friend Cynthia Harris, which would be published as “Hitler and Israel, or On Prayer,” where he argued that the Jewish persecution by the Nazis was the outgrowth of the same “furor Teutonicus” that had accompanied German nationalism and which had been behind the wave of religious persecutions in Germany in 1825, 1872, and 1933.39 Each time, he said Protestants, Catholics, and Jews were all persecuted, but on each occasion one particular group bore the brunt of the attack. If the latest purge was the worst, it was, in part, because the evil of persecution of faith itself had become an acceptable tactic of German politics. Moreover, each attack went further back in history to expunge the living God and His history so that the myths and gods of the pagans could take their place again. Thus, for Rosenstock-Huessy, the real reason for each of the attacks is that the spirits that are conjured up each time are conjured up in direct opposition to the God “who beckons us from the end of time as the common destiny of man.” The Teutonic myth lover finds this God of the future “an abomination to him because he is not found in the past,”40 just as He is an abomination because he holds the very things that are held to be sacred as but idols. The living revealer God is “quite logically …denied by Hitler, whether he comes as the messianic God of Israel, as the Founder of the Church, or as the speaker of the Sermon on the Mount.”41 In sum, for Rosenstock-Huessy, Hitlerism combines the mechanisms of modern humanism and naturalism with pagan invocations of tribal spirits. For Rosenstock-Huessy, the concoction is as heady as it is deadly. Or, to put a somewhat different nuance on it, Hitlerism is by no means incompatible with Humanism, at least when Humanism is shorn of its greater messianic purpose. While Rosenzweig did not live to see the full effect of National Socialism, he was well aware of its presence. It is difficult to be certain exactly what aspects of National Socialism he would have divided into Christian and pagan, and whether he would have been as silent on or as

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blind to Christianity’s anti-Jewish influence in Christendom, as Rosenstock-Huessy seems to have been.42 Rosenstock-Huessy’s version of Christianity is thoroughly orthodox in its emphatic commitment to the Augustinian distinction between the earthly and heavenly cities. The ‘heavenly city’ refers to the Church in its genuine mission, and even to movements that are overtly hostile to the Church when it has gone rotten and is in desperate need of rejuvenation. (In his studies of revolutions Rosenstock-Huessy uses the Jacobins to make this point.) It is, for Rosenstock-Huessy, impossible to be a Christian and an anti-Semite. That is, to be an anti-Semite is to have hardened one’s heart so that the divine radiance cannot break through the closed heart. How the Jews are treated is, for Rosenstock-Huessy, a symptom of the genuineness of the Christian faith of a people, a symptom of its openness or of its hardness of heart, which either will or will not tolerate this “stranger among the Gentiles.”43 “The Jewish question is not solved and will not be solved in a day,” he says in Out of Revolution, “because its very meaning is that it must be solved every day.” Rosenstock-Huessy reminds his readers there that “There is no absolute guarantee against the hardening of our hearts. No institution, no pope, no priest or theologian can prevent the relapse of man into his natural indolence.”44 And repeating Rosenzweig’s point that the Jew is a reminder to Christians that their Christianity is always in danger of sliding into paganism,45 he makes the point “that many pagans use Christianity as a veneer.” This was a point implicit in Rosenzweig’s characterization of the expansion of the Petrine Church, which he said frequently converted pagan bodies rather than souls.46 In sum, for Rosenstock-Huessy not loving the neighbor was simply anti-Christian. Like Rosenzweig he saw that the Church was ever torn between its originally Jewish command and its pagan temptations, and while its desire to convert may have been driven by love, its times of persecution reveal its own fears and evils. Moreover, the history of the Church was the history of the pouring of God into man (anthropurgy, says Rosenstock-Huessy, was what the Church Fathers, in the Athanasian Creed, called this process).47 Thus it was a history in which the dark human side was operative, and was something that had to be overcome over time. Across time, human beings learned from their suffering (their sin) and gradually clothed themselves in institutions erected upon and devoted to principles that had emerged as their response to try to close off one form of hell. Generally we get no sense in Rosenstock-Huessy of the more common post-Holocaust position that this horror was unique among evils.

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I don’t think Rosenstock-Huessy thought such an approach to evil was very helpful; there is a certain moral intensity in such a judgment, which is meant to awaken all to the moral depravity into which people may fall. However, it is at the very least arguable whether making one event the “typic” (to use Kant’s term from the Critique of Practical Reason) of evil does not have a negative side. That is, it concentrates attention on one of evil’s forms at the expense of alertness to other forms. Rosenstock-Huessy generally thought that “condemning iniquitous persecutions” does not help prevent the next one. Evil is always on the move and for us to think of its outbursts as unique helps little in the day-to-day task of preventing evil’s ever-new entrances into the world. Rosenstock-Huessy was well aware that ignorance and prejudice and hatred relating to race and faith and nation were great evils. He was also well aware that the tribal impulse that was so decisive in German anti-Semitism had to be seen through the experiences that shaped Germany, just as the anti-Semitism of other European nations had to be seen in terms of their history. In the case of Germany, its features also could not be extricated from the rancorous nationalist response of Germans to their defeat; that is, to the very problem that Rosenstock-Huessy had immediately tried to warn his fellows of in the aftermath of the Great War. Germany became tribal at a time when tribalism could not house the powers or the passions that were part of their social, administrative, technological, and economic constitution. I think the surprise in the question, “How could such a thing be done?” which spurred so many to write on the Holocaust, was less of a surprise to Rosenstock-Huessy. He had been preaching against modernity, paganism, nationalism, and Germany’s failure to seize a new future almost all of his adult life. I simply do not think that he ever underestimated what evils could be done by “civilized” peoples, by the depth of hatred that communities could store up, and by the hatred that nationalist fanatics would direct at the people who had transcended the nation. Moreover, he had been surrounded by death in the Great War, and was not insensitive to the grief it brought, but he simply did not see it as meaningful or valuable in providing a lexical ordering of evil. His opposition to such a lexical ordering is taken up in a section of the Soziologie, where he addresses his German readers on the mass rapes, forced expulsions, and general carnage that Russian troops had inflicted upon Germans in Silesia near the end of the Second World War: The sufferings of Nanking are no slighter than those of Kiev or Rotterdam. Hiroshima is as terrible as London and Dresden. The suffering of millions of splendid Sikhs is every bit as inexcusable as that of the Silesians.

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Thus he who wants to determine our point in time must see it on a planetary scale and not only think like a depressed European about his little Pan-Europa. The point in time can, in fact, only be known from the spirit. That is, it can only be known looking backward from the word having become spirit, but also looking forward from our solidarity with those who have suffered, with those destroyed by an incomplete order. Someone who can pick out the Germans who have been driven eastward from the hundreds of millions of homeless people may well do that. But the time can say nothing to him, because he is not able to perceive the diameter of the circle of the suffering; he does not know how to measure it.48

This is not simply a moral issue that Rosenstock-Huessy is making, but a recognition that the experience of injury easily breeds hatred. And only by deeply understanding the extent of the common lot of suffering are we able to stop the never-ending cycle of releasing suffering onto another victim. For his part, Rosenzweig had no doubt that anti-Semitism was essentially Christian—that at its core could be found the interpenetration of Christian dependency upon the Jews, Christian animosity to the Jews for not converting, and Christian jealousy of the Jews’ assuredness in their own election and redemption.49 But he does not equate Christian antiSemitism with racial anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, Rosenzweig’s genius is in no small part due to his alertness to anti-Semitism and the timeliness of his attempt at once to make the Jews proud of who they were while seeking to sway Christian peoples to forego what, from his position, was a patricidal act. Having said that, it is, however, equally true that Rosenzweig shared the same sense of horror as Rosenstock-Huessy at the all-encroaching spirit of naturalism / mechanism and its furtherance through humanism. The particular National Socialist inflection of antiSemitism was also, as Rosenstock-Huessy argued, to no small extent an extension of mechanism—in its means, as much as in its view of life. In spite of all his many criticisms of Christianity, Rosenzweig saw it is as essential to enter into alliance with Christianity against humanism, provided it could be rightly instructed in what it really was in relationship to Judaism. Humanism does not even see the Jewish life as something different from all other peoples—and this is so essential to his position that it renders utterly mistaken any interpretations of his thought that seek to give it an existential or post-modern inflexion.50 This was to a large extent what Rosenzweig was doing in the Star, and why he did not just want the Star to be seen as a Jewish book. Perhaps his position was most succinctly captured in a letter to Rudolf Hallo, in which he had said that he did not believe that the new philosophy

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was specifically Jewish, and that he would not have written the Star without Rosenstock-Huessy. Further, he said, he was on the same side as Hans Ehrenberg in his philosophical battles, and that he saw affinities between what he was doing and the Catholic public school teacher, Ferdinand Ebner. The important point “today,” he continues, is that European culture itself is threatened with collapse, and it can only be saved by supra-European, superhuman powers. Judaism, he notes, is one of those powers—adding that he won’t be disappointed when these powers will have to be Europeanized and secularized as part of their first step.51 Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig can then only be rightly understood—that is, understood as “new thinkers,”—if their internal disputation is viewed in light of their common commitment to overthrow the limitation of the totality of human powers by the denial of their activation of suprahuman, non-physical powers. “The enemy” for both is the limited view of humanity that comes from the limited view of how powers are created, circulated, perpetuated, and brought back to life, after having been thought spent. This view is an essential component of the meaning of life after death or redemption. To that end an alliance between Jews and Christians is necessary. As Rosenzweig would put it in the Star: Before God therefore, both, Jew and Christian, are workers on the same task. He cannot dispense with either. Between the two he set an enmity for all time, and yet he binds them together in the narrowest reciprocity. To us [Jews] he gave eternal life by igniting in our heart the fire of the Star of his truth. He placed the Christians on the eternal way by making them hasten after the rays of that Star of his truth into all time until the eternal end. We [the Jews] see therefore in our heart the true likeness of the truth, but for that we turn away from the temporal life, and the life of time turns away from us. They [the Christians], on the contrary, follow the river of time, but they have the truth only behind them: they are certainly guided by it, for they follow its rays, but they do not see it with their eyes. The truth, the whole truth, belongs therefore neither to them nor to us. For though we indeed carry it in us, yet for this reason too we must sink our glance into our own inside if we want to see it, and there we do see the Star, but not the rays. And belonging to the whole truth would be that one would see not only its light, but also what is illuminated by it. They however are destined all the same for all time to see what is illuminated, not the light.52

For this alliance to take place, it is absolutely essential that “the Christians cannot be in doubt. Our existence guarantees for them their truth.” 53 Because the danger of Christianity, for Rosenzweig, is that it succumbs to the pagan part of its intrinsic character. And in fact this is exactly what has happened with him (and Rosenstock-Huessy) with

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humanism. In Out of Revolution Rosenstock-Huessy had given a far more elaborate description of the modern triumph of humanism in his analysis of the French Revolution. The key components of his analysis are that it was a desperate attempt to create a new type of “man”—a new Adam (Rousseau’s contribution) in a world of ahistorical space (Descartes’ contribution), freed from the burden of superstition (Voltaire’s continuation of Descartes). The failure of France to rejuvenate its church, its slaughter and expulsion of the Huguenots, the University of Paris’s grim attempt to hang onto power at all cost, the destruction of the social role of French nobility and the clergy, the disempowerment of Paris, had all conspired to make the most explosive of solutions necessary for France’s spiritual survival. Its greatest spiritual triumph was the emancipation of the Jews and the transposition of the messianic message of Judaism and Christianity into the nation. Its failure to sustain that messianic mission and its growing chauvinism, most manifest in the Dreyfus Affair, combined with the general deterioration of the messianic aspirations of the European nations, had helped lay the groundwork for the Great War. (That the Russian Revolution would emerge from this furnace and continue to stamp indelibly upon humankind another—the ”material”—of its dimension was, he argues, the one solace that could be taken from that war.) Rosenstock-Huessy’s great thesis of his studies of revolutions was that the great revolutions commencing from what is usually known as the Investiture conflict, and what he calls the “papal revolution,” is the continuation of the enfolding of the species under the suffering of the cross. For his part Rosenzweig had argued that there were three main ages of the church—its Petrine (the visible Church of Rome), Pauline (the Reformer’s invisible Church), and Johannine (its institutional dissolution into secular but Christian-based forms). Rosenstock-Huessy took this idea further and had argued in his Soziologie that Jesus and the writers of the gospels had brought together, and thereby given new life to, the life-ways of the tribes, the empires, the prophets (the Jews), and the humanists or poets and legislators (the Greeks). These dominated the first thousand years of the church, and the next millennium was primarily dedicated to expanding the church and converting pagans. The next millennium would see the dissolution of the church into the nations and the creation of one planet that inherited the “results” of the great revolutions that had generated in Europe and then spread through the French and Russian revolutions to the rest of the world (thus for him Marxism brought Christianity to China). In fact, what he had done was give more material to Rosenzweig’s claim that the Christians make history while the Jews qua Jews, are for

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Rosenzweig not the makers of history. And this, despite the possibility that there are many (perhaps even a disproportionately high number of) Jewish individual geniuses who have contributed to the various spheres of human endeavor. But Jews embody the promise of the loving, redeeming God. They are a people whose very existence goes beyond the specific quality of collective acts (about which Rosenzweig says next to nothing because that is not the point he is making). According to Rosenzweig, the ineradicability of the Jews shows them to be God’s eternal people. And whereas they are, in this respect, in Rosenzweig’s sense, outside history, they are at once a hidden intrinsic force in history, a living embodiment of truth that makes of Christians their co-servants. If the works of the eleventh- to twelfth-century Jewish poet Yehuda Halevi, which Rosenzweig translated into German, are the seed, the rest of humanity forms the tree that is their tree that produces their seed. Here let it be written in [Y]ehuda Halevi’s own words: God has his secret plan for us, a plan that is like his plan for a seed-kernel that falls into the earth and seemingly changes into earth, water and manure, and nothing remains of it by which an eye might recognize it; and it is yet, on the contrary, precisely it that changes earth and water into its own essence and gradually decomposes their elements and transforms and assimilates them to its own matter, and so it forces forth bark and leaves; and when its inner core is made ready, so that the new developing likeness of its former seed may enter into a new corporeality, then the tree brings forth the fruit like the one out of which its seed once came; in this way the instruction of Moses attracts each who comes later, truly transforming him in accordance with himself. Although seemingly each rejects it. And those peoples are in preparation and being made ready for the Messiah, for whom we are waiting, who will then be the fruit, and all will become his fruit and confess him, and the tree will be one. Then they praise and they venerate the root that they once despised, of which Isaiah speaks.54

Thus does the Star at once deny the importance and role of history to the Jewish people, handing over God’s temporal task to non-Jews, to Christians. And yet Rosenzweig sees that the very end of history is a Jewish end. As Christians have universalized and spread, have conquered and proselytized, have carried with them their reconfiguration of pagan forms and institutions, they themselves have been transformed by the Jewish people, the people who have remained within, yet outside these forms. Christians spread out and seek to enfold all the times within Christianity’s own time, dividing history into a BC and an AD so that it can bring home to pagan consciousness all the better the central significance of love and suffering, and the movement of the loving God

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who places Himself through his most beloved, most suffering Son in the center of history. But the Jews turn inward. Their eternity is here and now, ever ready in anticipation that the moment of redemption will break into history, as God’s eternal love breaks into the world and the hearts of his beloved people as soon as they might echo Abraham’s “I am here,” they say, “We are here.” If the Christian is expansive, the Jew is narrow, in every way, even in faith, which is “a simple inner unity… not at all anything utmost, but the consciousness of God in the Jewish everyday life.”55 He remains outside history. That is, he does not need or seek to make history to become who he is; the Jew is, as we have said already, “a remnant” and “if the Messiah comes ‘today,’ the remnant is ready to receive him.”56 As eternally patient as the Christian is restless, yet not ineffective. Christians, that is, who sought to transform all into their image, have in turn been transformed by the people they have excluded and so often demonized and persecuted. Note that in all of this there is nothing in Rosenzweig that is a call to a particular kind of radical, voluntary action (and hence, it has nothing to do with post-structuralist political concerns). Instead, much of the power of the Star lies in the fact that it is a reminder to a people to know who they are and to understand what benefits and challenges flow from that condition. Nor does it involve a critique of other nations—for other nations are simply “other nations / peoples.” What he says about pagans, although it has frequently been interpreted in this light, is not even really a critique. It does not ask pagans not to be pagans. For Rosenzweig is not in the slightest bit interested in converting anyone to Judaism. As he reads it, and indeed for most of its history, Judaism has nothing to do with conversion. Indeed, if any pagan were to consider conversion after understanding the Star, it is far more likely to be to Christianity, the redemptive religion that does indeed require converts, and which is, for Rosenzweig, the best redemptive hope for pagans (though privately Rosenzweig eventually found Christians nauseating). As far as Christians go, the purpose of the Star is to show them their dependency upon the Jewish people—the people who first showed to them the God of creation, revelation, and redemption. None of this is to conceal the fact that for Rosenzweig the divide between Jews and Christians is great, indeed so great that Rosenzweig will say in a letter to Rosenstock-Huessy in 1919 that “the Star rests completely on one assumption, that Christianity is a lie.”57 A lie? Given what he actually says in the Star about the eternal necessity of both in God’s plan and given the reliance of Judaism upon Christianity’s historicizing mission for Jewish survival, one cannot help thinking the truth

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of the insight has been expressed with venom. That is, he wants RosenstockHuessy to accept his absolute and unwavering commitment to Judaism. If one puts aside all polemic and personal moments of frustration that Rosenzweig felt about Rosenstock-Huessy’s overbearing nature, the fact of the matter is that Rosenstock-Huessy also accepted the central consequence of Rosenzweig’s depiction of Jews and Christians. That is to say, Christianity required the continuance of Judaism for its own survival. It is astonishing that nearly no Rosenzweig scholar acknowledged in print that Rosenstock-Huessy had been convinced by Rosenzweig that the power and truth of Christianity were inseparable from its dependency upon Judaism. Further, Rosenzweig convinced Rosenstock-Huessy that the task of the hour for Christians was not only to throw off its Greek / pagan accretions, and attend once more to its Jewish basis, but also to accept its dependency upon Judaism. Of course, such an orientation does not fit with a view of Rosenstock-Huessy as someone hell-bent on converting Rosenzweig, but it is true. Thus immediately after the Second World War, Rosenstock-Huessy had criticized Martin Niemöller’s antiSemitic Christianity, arguing that “[w]ithout Judaism, Christianity becomes a sort of Fichte’s philosophy of the blessed life, becomes a befogging of concepts. And without Judaism, paganism becomes an orgiastic moment, a senseless chain of Dionysian stupors and Promethean flashes of lightning.”58 As Rosenstock-Huessy’s critique of Niemöller emphasizes, the expulsion and mass extermination of Germany Jews may have rendered Christianity impossible in Germany, precisely because there can be no future for Christianity where Judaism is not a powerful force: Maybe there cannot be a living Church in Germany, because there are no Jews. Of course he does not understand the impact of the question how there can be Christians without Jews. There may well be church-goers and state churches and prelates. But can these gentlemen perpetuate Christianity? Christianity is mission. Christianity fit, non nascitur. Without mission, state-churchliness must freeze into the ugly visage of the devil. Since the Jews have disappeared from Germany, who is hoping for the church? Niemoeller is not a Christian because he calls himself one, but he would be one if he would learn to understand the other faith.59

While the context of this formulation was the Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War, it was but the application of the same position he had expressed in his (now long-forgotten) review of the Star in 1921. In that review, he thanked Rosenzweig unreservedly for having revived a type in danger of being lost: the prophetic Jew, whose presence is a gift for the Christian. Rosenzweig, he says there, has shown that:

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… the Christian is overwhelmed by the same belief and the same love as the Jew…The complete width of the gulf between Jew and Christian revolves around the fact that only at the end of days is a reconciliation possible and not a moment before. But the great event in this lies in the fact that the Christian as seen by the Jew is also taken into account as intrinsic to the Jew’s own essence of belief. Thus the Christian becomes something that he wasn’t before: he becomes resolved in himself. Christianity, torn and sundered in itself, seemed to slowly distance and divide itself. In objection and resistance, however, it finds its essence. In the Jew the believing Christian can suddenly find himself as an unquestioned unity, as Christian par excellence. Churches, confessions, sects rise from the middle point. Suddenly there is an unambiguous point of belief, a specific Christianity, because there arises again—after the Zionist degeneration—an unambiguous questioner of faith: a prophetic Jew. His form, which steps next to us, produces, then, not merely static electricity which animates every strange geniality, rather he becomes a permanent condition of our souls. We experience a melt-down of the conditions of our being. Our life basis simplifies itself and through that simplification is rejuvenated.60

But Rosenstock-Huessy did not wait until the publication of the Star to accept Rosenzweig’s argument of Christian dependency upon the Jews. In his essay of 1917, “Ehrlos-Heimatlos” (without honor-without a home), Rosenstock-Huessy shows Rosenzweig’s impact upon him when he reflects upon Germany’s possible spiritual destiny, warning his compatriots away from seeking sustenance in the dead and poisonous forms of nationalism and statism. Rosenstock-Huessy repeatedly said they would only lead to more death. In this essay, he refers to the triad of JewChristian-pagan so that the line running from Christianity to paganism is one that takes its origin from Israel. He also emphasizes the core point in Rosenzweig that the Jewish people or nation is not a territorial people, but a people of the spirit: “So that the spirit of Israel must spread over the world, it must be disembodied, its vessel must be broken.”61 Further: A people has become disembodied so that the whole world can be clothed with its spirit; only its soul is left. The Jews thus are the only people who may be allowed, without mockery, to use the much too frequently misused expression of a national soul. Because the national soul is its entire expression.62

Of course, Rosenstock-Huessy still stood as a Christian and held up the example of Christ as the man whose body was pagan and whose soul was the fulfillment of the Jewish nation, and whose spirit was the first

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Christian: “…and hence he is the beginning, middle and the end of the human race; and is no longer Jew or pagan or Christian, but all is contained within him.”63 But what is clear here is that he, thanks to Rosenzweig, had overthrown the position earlier where he had placed pagans and Jews in the same camp. Rosenstock-Huessy’s acceptance and application of Rosenzweig’s triadic distinction were also deployed in his “Hitler and Israel.” Unlike the pagans, he argues, the Jews heard God’s “No” and thus their prayer had been heard, for it did not follow their own will, but God’s will.64 The Jews were open to revelation. We recall that Rosenzweig had argued that “Revelation is under the sign of the No … its original word is a No,” while Creation under the sign of the “Yes.” And so the people of Israel became a nation of prayer, again exactly as Rosenzweig had insisted:65 Israel built a temple, it is true, but they added that God did not dwell in it, as the gods of all other temples did: Israel voided the Temple. Israel circumcised her young men, it is true; but they did it to the child in the cradle, not to the initiate novice of the fertility orgies: Israel voided the rite. Israel wrote “poems,” but she denied that she “wrote” them lest man-made “poems” became idols. She insisted that she was told and that she replied: Israel voided the arts. In these three acts she emptied the three great “speeches” of the heathen, the tribal, the templar, and the artistic, of their lure and spell and charm. But Israel recognized herself in the divine “No” spoken over man’s naive pretenses. Majestically, the Bible is based on three divine “No’s.” The first is Man’s Fall, called his fall, made into his fall by God's judgment. The second is the Great Flood, judging the World of Tribes. And the third is the Exodus, the leaving of the temples and the fleshpots of Egypt, and the condemnation of everybody connected with the witchcraft of Egypt; since he used sorcery once, even Moses could not enter the Promised Land (Numbers 20). In listening to God’s “No,” Israel recognized herself as God’s servant, as mortal man in the face of God's majesty. In this “No” all merely human desires are burned out, and our notion of God's will is cleansed. “Revelation” is a knowledge of God’s will, after his “No” to our will has become known. Only then is God pure future, pure act—only when all his former creations stand exposed as non-gods, as mere artifacts. To have revealed what is not God is the condition for all our understanding of God. On this basis the Jews became prayer. Israel is neither a nation nor a state nor a race, but it is prayer. What are the prayers of Egypt or Rome, the prayers to Apollo or to Osiris, compared with the one hundred and fifty Psalms? The universal priesthood of all the Christian churches prays these psalms to this day. Isn't that strange? Why should there be something insuperable in these psalms? Why is it correct to say that the Psalms

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embody Israel as much as Abraham, Moses, or the Prophets? Because all Israel is prayer. The whole world repeats the Hebrew word “amen.”66

Likewise, in that same work he writes: “The Jews have universalized prayer. Their prayer leads to the true knowledge of God.”67 In sum, he had completely abandoned his position of 1916 that the Old Testament (and hence also the Jewish Bible, and by implication the Jewish faith) had been superseded and that the Christianity had a new Old Testament—to wit, church history.68 In conclusion let us close with a quotation from Rosenstock-Huessy. It was written just before the Second World War, and hence before the Holocaust and the State of Israel. As a contemporary assessment it might then be heavily criticized, but as an aspiration it powerfully encapsulates what he had learned from Rosenzweig about the triadic division among Jews, Christians, and pagans being a bedrock for understanding a great array of powers that are open to humankind. It also hints at another central theme of his work, that we are made by time (and speech is the way we as a species transfer time), that our freedom and our strength come from tapping the powers of the times, and that the great task before humanity today is to make contemporaries of distemporaries. This brings the times together, but without sacrificing the potencies which make us creatures of a divine creation. In spite of Hitlerism, we are living in a new era, because henceforth the functions of Gentiles, Christians, and Jews are no longer invested in a visible race, a visible clergy, and a visible Israel. In the future the character and function of a man can no longer be judged by the outward signs of race, creed, or country. He has to choose for himself. He may not even know whether he is going to act as a representative of Beginning, Middle, or End. Anybody can act, at any given moment, as the representative of body, soul or spirit, that is, of paganism, Judaism or Christianism. The yoke of embodiment in a clergy has ceased to be universal. The three properties of any higher life are now accessible at various times to various men.69

Wayne Cristaudo is Associate Professor and Deputy Head of the School of Modern Languages and Culture, and the Director of the European Studies Programme, University of Hong Kong.

CHAPTER NINE ORATE THINKER VERSUS LITERATE THINKER EUGEN ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY VERSUS FRANZ ROSENZWEIG— A DIFFERENCE THAT MAKES A DIFFERENCE

MICHAEL GORMANN-THELEN

I. Jumping into

I

MUST SAY: “Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973) and Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) never met.” Writing down this sentence (for a long time this has been a haunting melody for me), I know that it could be provocative. I say it with the best of intentions, and deliberately. It helps me to provoke or evoke the relationship of these two names. Everyone knows that such a relationship either did exist, or that it could exist at all. For various reasons, this certainty isn’t possible for me simply to admit. I began with the sentence: “I must say …” I insist on this must. Now I would have to say so many things about this must or this I must say. According to Rosenstock-Huessy one would be obliged to say that the mere act of uttering such words would be speaking out of historical experience. “Sprechen,” Rosenstock-Huessy said, “heißt Geschichte”—to speak means to enter history. When we say this, we immediately become the victim of something one could call the double-bind of two languages: English and German. What does heißen mean in English? For Rosenstock-Huessy this wasn’t a problem when he spoke, in 1935, on “the predicament of history.”1 This translation of my problem was, in reality, a translation of Nietzsche’s predicament: “Geschichte ist ein Glaubensartikel”—History is an article of belief. But my problem around “I must say” remains unsolved. Flash back to my sentence: “I must say …” One could say that by uttering such speech demonstrates a special grammatical mood, namely, a declarative mood of history. Why? Because, according to RosenstockHuessy, History itself (with a capital “H”), or special situations, urge us

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or force us to speak. We have to speak. That is a must. History is a must (be). The person who recently came across with this question in the United States was Gayatri Spivak,2 when she twice had to write her famous essay, “Can the Subaltern speak?” She didn’t know anything of Rosenstock-Huessy, but she brought forth this question, like a female Oedipus. She didn’t know about the riddle that is a riddle of history itself. Or the riddle of “When must you or I, or even we, speak?” Only I seem to be intrigued by that question. Now, the next question: What is history? History, as I was told in another formula of RosenstockHuessy, calls upon me: ama quia durissimum est (Love, because it is the hardest thing). Real history acts this way only so that people have to overcome the hardest resistance possible. Ironically, this is not a question of thinking, but a question of experience—and, finally—of social action: But when does the right time come? This formula stems from Augustine. But it was found, and interpreted afresh, by Rosenstock-Huessy.3 He could have said what Picasso once said: “I don’t seek, I find.” The hardest resistance thinkable or possible, the real thing is always absolutely unpredictable!4 Another time. In the beginning of the 1960s Rosenstock-Huessy composed, in collaboration with the historian Georg Müller, his last magnum opus, Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts. Eine leibhaftige Grammtik in vier Teilen (1963-1964). A possible translation could be “The Eloquence of Humankind. A Grammar of Flesh and Blood in Four Parts.” At the end of Volume 1 of this major work—which is, from my point of view, the real counter-fugue to Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption—his anti-summa summula appears, Angewandte Seelenkunde,5 or in English, as I would like to translate it: “The Soul’s Know-How.” It was first published as a little square booklet in 1924; but in its first version it was a letter sent to Franz Rosenzweig in 1916. At the end of their famous 1916 war correspondence, Rosenzweig asked his friend Eugen to write a letter on “languages“ (Sprachen). That was in the beginning of December. “If you want to write to me about particular matters, please write to me about “The Languages.”6 RosenstockHuessy’s last work accomplished during his life time was an edition of that 1916 correspondence, published in 1969. He added a footnote to his reprint of Angewandte Seelenkunde, in Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts, in which he said, “This ‘Grammar’ [Lehre—that is, teaching, or even torah] was sent as a Sprachbrief” to Franz Rosenzweig in 1916. The word was translated by Rosenstock-Huessy as speech letter; but it was the letter on “The Languages.” It was written against all philosophy of language.7 So,

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what is “all” philosophy of language about? In my opinion, this letter was written as a birthday letter for Franz Rosenzweig in 1916, that is, on the 25th of December, 1916. It deals the death-blow to all philosophy of language. It rejects all philosophy of language and at the same time addresses what real history calls upon us (heißt). This sentence is a death sentence—but it remained totally unknown! This is the sentence: “All philosophy of language confuses (verwechselt) the language instinct [or our inborn ability to speak] with history, which forces us to speak.”8 In this sense I repeat: “I must say: ‘Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (18881973) and Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) never met.’” In other words, after 1929 and after 1933, when Rosenstock-Huessy committed an excessive or exorbitant act of freedom, or, in the sense of Percy Byssche Shelley, a real “triumph of life,” then again after 1945 and after 1973, no one felt the necessity that forces someone (or forces us) to speak “out of” Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. We have had a lot of Philosophy, an abundance of Theology, even of Jewish Studies, but never, never have we spoken in the sense in which Eugen RosenstockHuessy and Franz Rosenzweig had to speak! In 1944, Eugen RosenstockHuessy even sharpened this obligation to act in an historical sense, that is, in the sense in which one has to speak in flesh and blood (leibhaftig). Rosenstock-Huessy said that we mostly are acting as “distemporaries“ of our age(s). That means that we lived as if they had lived – in vain. The first breach of this “in vein” is this conference! And just prior to this conference was another in Frankfurt / Main where both Rosenzweig and Rosenstock had each lived for a time. What is Rosenstock-Huessy’s Sociology about? It’s on Sprechenmüssen—about “We—you and I—have to speak.” Otherwise, we remain “the damned of the earth” (Frantz Fanon) or muted!

II. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig. A Difference that Makes a Difference Is there a difference between Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy? This question has never been significantly raised, nor ever answered. For a long time, we have had discussions and discourses that show up certain prejudices, mostly against RosenstockHuessy. But such biases are a topic unto itself, for research elsewhere. More important is the evidence that (nearly) nobody has read Rosenstock-Huessy. There is no Rosenzweig study of which one could really say that they relied on reading the sources, the documents, the biographies, and so on. Seen from Rosenstock-Huessy’s side, the

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situation is a little bit better. Further, I have to say that it seems to make no difference if one does not differentiate between the two. I know what I’m talking about when I say Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig are in the grip of “indistinction” (Jean-Claude Milner). What would make them distinct? Franz Rosenzweig’s mind and expression are based on literacy and writing. This “speech-thinking“ is a Germanism, based on his being seduced by German Idealism. His idiomatic style is deeply influenced by early nineteenth-century German philosophy, especially by Richard Wagner’s styles of discourse, which oscillate between High Pietism and Bildung und Besitz (a blending of German bourgeoisie and aristocracy). The Bildung und Besitz is a language that runs counter to the styles of discourse of eighteenth-century Enlightenment (Aufklärung), which are shaped by the sober style and discourse registers of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Christoph Martin Wieland, and “Kant, the Jew, the German” (as said by Jacques Derrida).9 Rosenzweig’s style is analytic; it is sequential, periodically elaborated, sometimes redolent of Hebrew syntax and lexis (for example, “Strong as death is love” in the Song of Solomon). An academic discourse style is also present. Rosenzweig at his best is in his letters. Their physiognomy is over-shaped (Sigmund Freud’s problems with überdeutlich), acute, and demonstrating a certain acuteness, mixed in with a high proportion of wit and sarcasm, even with a tone of satire in his textual voices. The letters are even driven by a certain rude aggressiveness, sometimes symptomatic of a certain self-hatred. On the other hand, Rosenzweig’s styles are highly dependent on what a contemporary of his, the art historian Aby Warburg, called Pathosformeln—formulas encoding certain figures of pathos. The letters are really dialogically or polyphonically voiced, showing a mixture of various tropes of the rhetorics of affects, impassioned by a certain Schwärmerei, (that is, between sentimentalism and rapture, between Kitsch and poignancy). As a literate mind he is most deeply influenced by Friedrich Schiller, then by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, and even by Heinrich Heine.10 Strangely enough, he is totally unaffected by all languages of materialism and the workers’ movement of the nineteenth century. Instead of this tradition, he is marked by a sort of “yawning void” (Max Raphael) of the art historian Heinrich Woelfflin, whose style he was very fond of (“I am a Woelfflinian!”). The language strata of Hebrew operate in subversion of the unconscious strata of his German language. Throughout his life, Rosenzweig remained unattracted to Freud (and Kafka). More insistent was the influence of Johann Gottlieb Fichte—

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a fact not yet observed or disclosed by Rosenzweig scholars.11 So one can conclude from this: Rosenzweig was a truly literate thinker. Rosenstock-Huessy is a thinker of a very different kind. He doesn’t have a literate mind in the sense of Rosenzweig, although one should say that he is also of a literate mind. His mind and his systems of expression work according to complete, distinct information or pre-in-form-ation (Bildung) processing. I call him an orate thinker. What is this? An orate (not oral!) thinker is someone whose polyphonic system(atic)s of pre-in-form-ation (Rosenstock-Huessy’s translation of German Bildung in his Out of Revolution: “preformation”12), and the processing of history is shaped and worked through by a mode of socialization (Vergesellschaftung) of heteroclitic orally / aurally encoded and transmitted traditions and their iconographical visions. These traditions have one problem, namely, to maintain continuity and transmission (Weitersagen) despite the constant threads of being interrupted, destroyed, or annihilated by (w)holes and abysses of history. In a certain sense, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s whole thinking (dependent on the ear or on hearing) is, in its depths, more driven and more overtly shaped by Judaism, its Galuth existence, and its Hebrew idiomaticity than Rosenzweig’s! Up till now, no one has read RosenstockHuessy’s The Eloquence of Humankind.13 If you would read this grammar incarnated, you would be overwhelmed by its Hebrew or Jewish orality. I don’t like to call it orality because the distinct features of RosenstockHuessy’s modes of expression are fulfilled by all modes of orate socialization. These are the styles and registers of his discourse, apart from the tradition of the Christian churches, their liturgy and other languages, echoed by or in resonance with the mnemonics and formulas. His styles, his whole Sprachlichkeit (idiomaticity) is more paratactic than hypotactic, more aggregative than analytic, analogue and redundant or copious. The skills of that orate socialization are not dependent on certain peaks of literacy, but on groundwater, or streams and riverbeds, and the flow of empowerment, the manifold systems of addressivity of that orate socialization. So when Rosenstock-Huessy speaks in regard to himself as an impure, or even a daughterly thinker, no one has taken this seriously.14 But this self-characterization is highly significant and distinctive. It also breaks with paternalistic genealogy. These features must be so disturbing to others that no one has ever paid any attention to it. It is a question of the subnoxious, as James Joyce would say. The speech-thinking of the Star of Redemption is, seen from another angle, the German-Jewish equivalent of Joyce’s Stephen Hero. All four of Rosenstock-Huessy’s autobiographies [Die Hochzeit des Krieges und der Revolution (the

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marriage of war and revolution, 1920); The Inheritors of Industry. Ecodynamics of a Mechanized World (1935); Soziologie (In the Cross of Reality. A post-Goethean sociology, 1956-1958), and Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts (the eloquence of humankind, 1963-1964)] are orately based German discourse genres. Their system(atic)s of thought are also orately based. There is no surprise in Rosenstock-Huessy’s opening of his Sociology with “around 1800,” which is clearly in contradistinction to Rosenzweig’s axial time of “around 1800.”. So: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy is an orate thinker, and his modes of thought and expression are but one constant flow of Midrashim!

III. A Few Preliminary Comments on Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s Sociology15 Rosenstock-Huessy published his Sociology forty years after a first draft (then called Volkswissenschaft (the science of people), dated November 9, 1918, as a book on sociology), and thirty-three years after the publication of the first volume of his sociology [Berlin: Julius Springer Verlag, as Die Kräfte der Gemeinschaft (The forces of the community)]. That first volume, the initial version of which appeared in 1925, was published in 1956 (the second edition in 1960). Its main title was Sociology, and its subtitle, In Two Volumes. The main title of the first volume is now Die Übermacht der Räume (the predominance of space). Its second volume, which readers were waiting for since 1925 (or even since 1918), then appeared under the main title, Die Vollzahl der Zeiten (the full count of times). Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy wrote and re-wrote this second volume across a span of more than twenty years. At least two versions were written as, or referred to as, the written corpora of a correspondence. Other versions were sent to friends or to publishers. All what I have said in respect to the title Soziologie is irrelevant! That title was illegitimately assigned by the publisher; it was not authorized by the author. This was common practice among German publishing houses after World War II. It was especially common practice in dealing with the work of emigrés (at that time, a common swear word in Germany). The publisher did not assign a managing editor to the work. No proofreading was done. The manuscript—some of it typed, some of it handwritten—was given directly to the typesetters. So the manuscript was typeset according to what the staff could read, as well as what they could not read! This Sociology was, in the language of editing, a corrupt edition. And no one noticed.

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The same is true in the public’s reaction. Some newspaper reviews made the author and his book objects of ridicule: “A relic of German spirit.” One young sociologist published an advance review, an essay appearing in a theological journal called Young Church. Shortly afterward, this angry young man crossed swords with RosenstockHuessy. He never made any concession to Rosenstock-Huessy, and never acknowledged that he had been part of a political alliance against Rosenstock-Huessy. The only good review was written by a young theologian, but it was published in a journal for Protestant pastors. It was tantamount to casting pearls before swine. Rosenstock-Huessy’s Sociology was whirled into oblivion by the maelstrom of Western Germany’s amnesia after National Socialism. Just at the moment in which Sociology was published, academic or professional sociology went to the United States. German sociologists were discovering Talcott Parsons and empirical sociological research policies. Max Weber was re-discovered, but in his American version. In Germany the masterminds were Rudolf Bultmann and Martin Heidegger. Or the theologian Karl Barth. The leftists discovered the young Karl Marx. All of them were mortal intellectual enemies of Rosenstock-Huessy, not to mention thinkers who had collaborated with National Socialism, and were now re-appearing as purified. As Hegel would have said: Rosenstock-Huessy was about as dead as a dog. He no longer had any symbolic capital. All the German lawyers and professors teaching law were suffering from total amnesia. The sociologists were on a different track. A few educators knew of his name. But his opponents from the times of Weimar also had won. RosenstockHuessy was the representative of Social Romanticism and Anti-Marxism. Many of his friends never went back to Germany, or they had been murdered by the Nazis. The emigrés were all hated in those days. Marlene Dietrich, when visiting for the first time in Berlin after the war, was labeled not just an émigré, but also a spy, or even a prostitute for the American Allied Forces. Bertold Brecht’s plays were forbidden. In the 1960s and 1970s, and the days of the international student movements, all who weren’t considered leftist were called fascists. So Rosenstock-Huessy and many others became victims of a second disaster. On the other hand, the welfare-state was predominant. No one wanted to deal with RosenstockHuessy’s experiences in modern industry, after the time of Henry Ford. Today Rosenstock-Huessy seems useless because the welfare-state is but an episode of globalization. Hypercapitalism became a sort of theology of its own. The “theocracy of the market” (Judith Kindt) is doing its

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“destructive work” (Detlev Clausen). To recall and to forget is disappearing within a generalized social Alzheimer’s Disease. Today a better sociologist would be the late Samuel Beckett. The original title of Rosenstock-Huessy’s Sociology was Im Kreuz der Wirklichkeit (in the Cross of Reality); the title itself refers to Hegel. In my opinion the translation should be “Reality’s Crosses.” The original subtitle was: “A post-Goethean Sociology.” About this subtitle, I have this to say: When this sociology was written (primarily in the 1940s, shortly after National Socialism and the Shoah) the first conference on Goethe was held in Boulder, Colorado, in 1949. One famous participant at that conference was Martin Buber, who spoke on Das Reinmenschliche (The truly pure human), in the context of Goethe. But the man who seriously, but unsuccessfully, began trying in 1945 to organize a bicentenary conference on Goethe was a physician from Frankfurt am Main, Richard Koch. What was extraordinary about his conference plan was that it would involve former German Jews, displaced or expelled by the National Socialists. Koch was living at that time in the Caucasus, but died in that Goethe bicentenary. He was Franz Rosenzweig’s physician. Who knows of him, now? Goethe had a deep impact on members of Rosenzweig’s and Rosenstock-Huessy’s generation. Switching from the subtitle of this book to the first part, first chapter, titled “Freedom,” one can read the title of chapter 1: Sprachnot. Das Versagen des Namens. This is difficult to translate well into English, but it is something like this: “When we aren’t able to speak. Deprived of Names.” But also: “We cannot speak if we are not called to by our own names!” Chapter 3 deals with “The first sociologist.” Who is it? Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, who today is regarded as a well-known utopian socialist thinker. His most famous disciple, the so-called founder of sociology, was Auguste Comte. You have only to remove all the names of Saint-Simon, and you will get Comte! In this minor detail, you can become aware of one of RosenstockHuessy’s most surprising sociological discoveries. So Comte is known as the founder of sociology. What does that mean? In German, there is quite a remarkable difference that makes a big difference! Founder in German can be: (a) der Gründer or der Begründer; with this sense of the word, you can found a new school of sociologists or a new city. You can use this word to describe Talcott Parsons, the American sociologist who founded the “action theory” of an analysis for society, for example. But there is another word for founder in German, which has a completely different, even distinct, social reality or social action. It does not begin to

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describe Parsons! The word is Stifter, someone who creates people who are free and willing to follow him. So Jesus Christ is the founder (Stifter) of Christianity, but St. Paul is a founder (Begründer) of Christianity. To found, with this double meaning, provides a remarkable example of what Derrida called “the différance.” Saint-Simon is a Stifter, and Comte is a Begründer of modern sociology. According to Rosenstock-Huessy, himself the first modern or “post-Goethean sociologist, Saint-Simon became such a founder NOT because of what he has written or done, but only because of the “fait total” (Émile Durckheim) that his life was totally unsuccessful. He completely failed. But he failed because he tried to do something revolutionary: to make his life a social experiment out of the future. The same with Goethe. He seemed to be the most successful artist of his times, an epoch-making artist. But it was, according to Bert Brecht, a descent to glory (Abstieg in den Ruhm). His main creation, Faust, completely failed, too. But he failed because he was too successful. The interesting thing with this opening part of Rosenstock-Huessy’s sociology is that Saint-Simon is called “the first sociologist”; but Goethe is only alluded to, indirectly. Both their failures reflect the dialectics of to found (gründen and stiften). Saint-Simon failed because he was a failure in his life; Goethe failed because of his success. Goethe is made an instance of a post-Goethean method. According to what is to be demonstrated by this first part of his sociology, the method of “in the cross of reality.” Once we have been introduced to this new method (called post-Goethean or In the Cross of Reality), we look for two other sociologists. We were introduced to Saint-Simon, who failed completely in making his life a future (called by Rosenstock-Huessy metanomics, which is, on the conceptual level of his method, also known as preject). And we were confronted with Goethe, who failed just because of his success. On the conceptual level, this is known as traject, where on the time axis of the past, it is a method containing all the traditions he was able successfully to embody, but in the last instance, failed. Who could be the two others? Now, we would expect, according to Rosenstock-Huessy’s Cross of Reality, two more first or post-Goethean sociologists. But no. There are no more first sociologists. According to Rosenstock-Huessy’s Cross of Reality or metanomics, or sociology, one sociologist would be a member of the inner circle of all these first sociologists (an introject). And the other one would have to be the one battling with the hostile powers of reality that are going to destroy him, annihilate him, make him a victim, make him a suffering creature of these powers (an abject). Keep in mind that this Cross of Reality is, if it is related to its historical hour, or date, or

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cross, another “around 1800.” It is not Rosenzweig’s one—that is, Hegel, Kant, Fichte and Schelling. Rosenstock-Huessy’s Cross of 1800 is embodied by names of neither philosophy nor theology! We already have Saint-Simon, and we have Goethe. Going back to what I said about being an orate thinker: What is most significant for all orate thinkers is that their thinking and their modes of expression are only the tip of the iceberg. All who want to become familiar with an orate thinker (the only other orate thinker comparable to Rosenstock-Huessy is, in my opinion, the late French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan) have to become part of the method themselves and must be addressed to re-create for themselves all that what has NOT been said, or what is NOT seen. So metanomics requires an active participant, or cocreator, in the method, who will discover along the way parts of reality he or she is not yet familiar with. In conclusion, I will give you a hint about the sociologists “around 1800” who cannot yet be addressed. One needs some historical insight or knowledge to detect these sociologists. That’s another demand of Rosenstock-Huessy’s method. You have to make yourself familiar with historical situations, yours included. That has to be a constant effort. You might be reminded, perhaps, of someone else’s embodiment of Kant as a negative sociologist (introduced in a special chapter by RosenstockHuessy). Asserted first by Jacques Lacan, that would be the Marquis de Sade, who wrote a revolutionary pamphlet as a supplement to his Philosophy in the Boudoir: “Frenchmen, another effort is required!” As far as I know of “around 1800,” there is only one sociologist who could be named as someone to complete Rosenstock-Huessy’s Cross of Reality. Interestingly it will be the first woman sociologist – at least in Europe. She is the one who created the first Internet, the first World Wide Web, the first network of “around 1800.” It was an epistolary web or network, and she was introjecting, from inward, new names for people in flesh and blood, by addressing them with names and sending them letters, creating a sort of networking, only through correspondence. She is Rahel von Varnhagen [b. Levin (1771-1833)].16 It was she to whom Hannah Arendt dedicated her first book, just before she had to flee Germany under National Socialism. Rahel’s password was: “Bitte, antworten Sie mir!” (“Please, answer me!”) Rahel’s correspondence was really a sociological reality unto itself. Its documentary method has been authenticated by and made accountable by the sociologist Harold Garfinkel.17 She has written marvelous letters, whole bodies of correspondence. They are mostly written without punctuation (remember

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Molly’s monologue at the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses), but being accurately punctuated by her rhetoric of affects and affections! One other first sociologist, from my point of view, would be Georg Büchner (1813-1837), whose plays (somewhat comparable to the greatest American modern drama writer, Edward Albee) are all driven by people who have to suffer from the most intense events of history. These range from revolution (Georges-Jacques Danton), to madness (Lenz), to nihilism (Leonce and Lena), and to incredible suffering of being the poorest of the poor—Woyzeck the Mute. Rosenstock-Huessy might have made a different move. There are many possibilities. At the end of his Sociology I, 300 pages into it, the reader will possibly discover the missing two sociologists we had expected when reading the first part of the book. They are introduced by a third party. This is very important! According to Rosenstock-Huessy we always have to be introduced by a “passionate third,“ as in real life. Only the devil, according to the Rolling Stones, is someone who introduces himself without any passion: “Please, allow me to introduce myself. I’m a man of wealth and taste …” The two sociologists who were called upon by Rosenstock-Huessy are Descartes and—Nietzsche. Descartes is a representative of pure thinking, of analytical thinking. Nietzsche, so important for Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy (as discussed by Wayne Cristaudo), will have been introduced by Rosenstock-Huessy someone who had been crossed off the list by all who didn’t heed him when it was most needed. So he went mad, in the same year, as the Senatsgerichtspräsident Schreber, a High Court judge in Saxony.18 That happened in 1888—annus horribilis. But Rosenstock-Huessy then made a move that could not have been predicted. He confronted pure thinking (Descartes) with pure drama as opera (Wagner). He introduced Nietzsche as a third party, simultaneously being the most suffering victim (The Crucified One), and the one who laughs everything off with a “to hell with it” attitude (Dionysos). All these geniuses—Descartes, Wagner, Nietzsche—are embodiments of ONE age, ONE time, ONE reality. “But the peoples of the world live pleiochronically (in many ages), in the full count of the times.” Thus ends Volume I (ONE) of Rosenstock-Huessy’s Sociology. What did Ralph Waldo Emerson say in Representative Men? There is a moment, in the history of every nation when, proceeding out of this brute youth, the perceptive powers reach with delight their greatest strength and have not yet become microscopic, so that the man, at that instant extends across the entire scale, and, with his feet still planted on the immense forces of Night, converses by his eyes and brain with Solar and

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Michael Gormann-Thelen is a Research Assistant at the Center for Religious Studies, University of Bochum, Germany.

CHAPTER TEN SOVEREIGNTY AND SACRIFICE IN WRITINGS BY EUGEN ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY AND FRANZ ROSENZWEIG GREGORY KAPLAN

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HE CYCLES OF RETURN and the lines of progress in writings by Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy betoken a chain of terms—sovereignty, suffering, sacrifice, surprise, substitution, survival, security, service, salvation—that afford ample precedence in ancient Jewish ritual, medieval Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Its origin lies in the books of Deuteronomy and Isaiah with their cyclically progressive, progressively cyclical stories of Israel’s birth, death, and rebirth: the Chosen People makes a covenant with God, only to rebel against divine commands, repent its sin, and reconcile once again with the deity. This essay shows how Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy give compelling and challenging articulations of the sovereignty of sacrifice in view of their shared assumptions and the differing conclusions about philosophy, Jewish observance, and Christian faith. Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy alike cast doubt on strictly rational views of sovereignty and sacrifice. In a basic formulation, the politically sovereign is “the supreme authority within a territory.”1 It is the authority to rule, order, and govern—within limits of time and space— violence, chaos, and anarchy. Its power translates into a “monopoly on the use of physical force,” as Max Weber put it.2 However the monopoly preserves itself by force, it was (a) force that originally inaugurated the monopoly. More generally, then, sovereignty combats the power of disintegration or plurality with the integrity or monopoly of power. The integrative power must, paradoxically, disintegrate its own disintegrative tendencies. A great risk posed to sovereignty is not the enemy outside, but the enemy within, a fifth column, and, more broadly, the domestic threat of revolution. Ever since Giambattista Vico described and Baruch Spinoza

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justified social, political, and legal revolutions in history, the motivating internal conflict or disloyalty struggle against a monopoly. Sovereignty has its origin and its limit in the resistance of the territory over its supreme authority. Sovereignty without sacrifice is blind; sacrifice without sovereignty is empty. In order to realize its perfection, however, sovereignty uses means that subvert its end by normalizing the exceptionality it authorizes. “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” writes Carl Schmitt. The normal, as in usual, situation does not require the external justification of authority.3 Authority is proved in its capacity to suspend normality and replace it with an exceptional norm. “[Its] authority proves that to produce law [sovereignty] need not be based on law.” The normality of law guarantees enforcement by the power that can abrogate it. When the exception becomes the norm, that is, the judge determines justice rather than justice guiding the judge—or as Schmitt writes, “it matters that one decides, not how one decides”—then sovereignty sacrifices its legitimacy by exempting it from the normal. Sovereignty reaches its limit, either by sacrificing itself or another. No less than self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of the enemy will approach a point of diminishing returns. The sovereign controls territory, but no land expands without end and no time extends forever. (Even the Thousand-Year Reich of National Socialism delimited its reign.) The overexertion of the sovereign exception to justify the normal sacrifice (for instance, in fighting at war, as so many men had) promoted by Schmitt was, in fact, a cogent reaction to the dissolution of any common effort amid the crisis of the parliamentary system in the Weimar Republic. Notably, a crisis of sovereignty had arisen before World War I and intensified during the 1920s. Seeds of discontent germinated as early as a 1910 conference where Rosenstock first met Rosenzweig. Soon thereafter, Rosenzweig lost his esteem in the systematic totality of history to explain historical events; he worried that totality swallows up difference, that sovereignty overrules any exceptions to the norm it exceptionally authorizes. Similarly, Rosenstock abandoned his expectations for the detailed narration of law to comprehend legal rules; he worried that individuality detaches from relationship, that sovereignty exempts its normality from the rules of the common. If sovereignty enjoins the sacrifice of submission, and sacrifice enjoins the submission to sovereignty, then how could the submission of sacrifice potentially revolt against the sovereignty of submission? How would sacrifice instigate a revolution that would justify a sovereign, and so forth?

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Private and Public Crises A critical moment, a moment of crisis, defines each thinker’s life and his or her thinking about life. Put simply, Rosenzweig finds himself outside a people to whom he wishes to enter within for God’s sake; and Rosenstock-Huessy discovers himself inside a secularism from which he wishes to open up for God’s sake. Either way, crises and survival correspond. As Rosenstock-Huessy put it in Practical Knowledge of the Soul, “Crisis, the external process which breaks in upon the soul, corresponds to the power to endure, the soul’s ability to bear pain” or suffer. Therefore, “blessed is the person who—despite temptations of pleasure and pain—resolutely subordinates himself to his soul, who does not disintegrate into body and spirit.” Life gives itself to “a thou (Du), as a soul addressed by God.”4 Rosenzweig observes (in his October 17, 1920 inaugural address to the Freie Jüdische Lehrhaus) that Jews now find their “home outside the Jewish world.” Today, Jewish learning moves “from the periphery back to the center (Zentrum); from the outside, in.”5 Indeed, Rosenzweig’s early education focused on medicine and, then, Hegel’s political philosophy, on which topic he completed a dissertation in 1912 (revised and published in 1920). While studying “some law” at the University of Leipzig for a year beginning summer 1912, Rosenzweig, along with his cousin Rudi Ehrenberg and his new friend Eugen Rosenstock, enjoyed on July 7, 1913, what they called the “night discussion (Nachtgespräch),” ranging over questions of theodicy, reason, history, and revelation.6 In the discussion, as Rosenstock later recalled in the “Prologue / Epilogue to the Letters—Fifty Years Later,” Rosenzweig “defended the prevailing philosophical relativism of the day, whereas Eugen bore witness to prayer and worship as his prime guides to action.” Rosenstock-Huessy discovered that an orientation for any terrestrial sovereignty, or power of reason, must come from outside it. The 1913 discussion, Rosenzweig later recalled, had “forced me to take an absolute standpoint.” Neither a dualistic Kantian logic of practical and theoretical reason (Vernunft) nor a dialectical Hegelian system of the concept (Begriff) could possibly account for the sentence, “God created the earth and the heavens.” The idea is sui generis. No devil in the form of a random skepticism or a systematic rationality would be able to explain the truth of it. Rosenzweig no longer put revelation into a subservient position relative to the rule of history and the logic of science. That conversation addressed shared “questions of faith” because “it was not Judaism and Christianity that were then arrayed against each other, but

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rather faith based on revelation (Offenbarungsglaube) was contrasted with faithfulness in philosophy (Philosophiegläubigkeit).”7 The apparent contradiction of revelation to reason is a familiar one; but it was only the starting point for Rosenzweig and Rosenstock. Rosenstock later made the distinction (in his 1935 / 1955 “In Defense of the Grammatical Method”), which Rosenzweig had also commended in his 1925 essay, “The New Thinking,” between cognitive ratiocination and the spoken word. “Through speech, society sustains its time and space axes.” Moreover, “as living beings, we are responsible for the conservation of the accomplishments of the past, the fulfillment of the future, the unanimity of the inner, the efficiency of the external front of life…. And in this delicate and dangerous exposure … our words must strike a balance; language distributes and organizes the universe, in every moment, anew.”8 Not just words, but the names that things take on as their own are the saving mettle and the proving ground that Rosenzweig had found in the synagogue. “It is the fate of the group whether this group is doomed or going to survive, that builds up the grammar of society,” that apportions names unanimously, efficiently, from the past, into the future.9 “Listen, lest we die”: Survival derives not from words or language per se, but from speaking and listening, calling out a name, and responding to the call of a name. The 1913 Nachtsgespräch between Rosenzweig and Rosenstock prefaced Rosenzweig’s summer-long crisis and subsequent breakthrough. By October 1913 Rosenzweig had discovered an orientation for himself, writing in a letter that he decided not to convert to Christianity as he had previously vowed, because it “no longer seems necessary to me, and therefore, being what I am, no longer possible. I remain therefore a Jew (Ich bleibe also Jude).”10 Not simply one isolated Jew, however, but a member of the Jewish people. For the collective Jewish people and the individual Jewish person are not equivalent. Indeed, the former often comes at the expense of the latter. Whatever the metaphysical promise of Judaism, the historical Jews risk suffering under triumphant imperial Christian powers. Rosenzweig, reversing a Christian view of Jewish stubbornness, insists that Judaism perpetually awaits the arrival of its own consummation—or the consummation of its own prolepsis—due to no free choice of its own.11 The Jewish people waits only because Christianity remains wanting in its achievement of the mission to reach God through Jesus. For the Jews only wait “as long as there remains a Judaism.” Remaining a Jew in history is the necessary reminder that Christianity has not completed its historical task or mission of bringing the pagans to God.

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The synagogue “must renounce all work in this world and muster all her strength to preserve her life and keep herself untainted by life.” It can accept “the church as the salvation for the heathens” so long as it abides “the works of its ritual.” By contrast, while the church is “sent to all men, she must nevertheless not lose herself to what is common to all men.” Just such pagan “foolishness,” which corrupts the ultimate goal proffered by the “sign” of Judaism, alerts the church of a “stumbling-block” for its advancement through the Lord toward the Father. “And when the last pagan has been silenced in time through the work of the church, no one will take the work of the cross—at the end of time, but still in time—to be foolishness.” Pagans who see gods everywhere would hope the church forget about the Jewish “stumbling block” and instead “become reconciled with that which is ‘common to all men’ (Allgemeinmenschlichen).” The synagogue, however, retains its particularity, “not seduced by the Allgemeinmenschlichen,” and reproves the Church like a “silent warning” not to slide back into paganism.12 “As long as Judaism remains,” it will stick like a thorn in the side of the church. Until the end, the Jew lives the metaphysical completion of God's promise that Christianity’s historical incompletion precludes. Rosenzweig concludes: The Church knows Israel will be spared (aufbewahrt) until the day when the last Greek has withered on the vine, the work of love completed, and the judgment day, the harvest day dawns. But what the church grants to Israel as a whole (als Ganzem), she refuses to grant to the individual Jew (einzelnen Jude), on whom the church will and shall test her strength to win him over.

To serve as a witness or presage of the final goal toward which Christianity strives, the church will “spare” the life of Israel and then, presumably, no longer! The possible difference in the claim that, on the day when the last pagan converts, a church that will let God save Israel, or a church that will put aside Israel by itself, seems moot. Where sovereignty is imperative, sacrifice is indicative. To retain or regain the proper kind of sovereignty needed or sufficient to attain salvation, as the Bible and Greek tragedians alike proposed, expected sacrifice. What does it mean to sacrifice for the survival of salvation or the salvation of survival? Sacrifice means giving up something of prized value, for example, the beloved son, for the sake of receiving a blessing from something that prizes value, for example, God.13 Sacrifices in the Bible, such as donating first fruits and slaughtering animals, which mediated human contact with divinity by ending one life in exchange for another, took on a range of meanings. These meanings included purifying

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the soul, supporting the Temple, abiding the providence of God’s covenant with Israel, and repudiating idolatry. If, according to a secular view, God and worship do not justify ending life, then what force could biblical laws and narratives of sacrifice exert? Have the various biblical meanings of sacrifice any relevance to secular views of Jewish culture, or Jewish views of a secular world? That few thinkers have called for rebuilding the Temple makes efforts since its destruction to justify sacrifice in biblical terms only the more paradoxical. For while post-biblical Jewish tradition implied (through kiddush ha-shem) that martyrs “went willingly to a death that was never called off but only miraculously reversed,” as Jon Levenson writes, it seems that such a miraculous reversal is discarded or attenuated by a secularization that allows meaning to evolve historically, or that constructs meaning by human assertion. Sacrifice entails a tension between the exchange of gifts (to give in order to receive) and the gratuity of the giving that brooks no repayment.14 On the one hand, sacrifice travels a straight line between the giver and the given. On the other hand, sacrifice demands that the giver give without demanding the given give anything. In a series of letters in 1916, Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig debated this tension between reciprocal and distributive exchange of sacrifice and sovereignty. Rosenzweig worries about the immanence of totality absorbing the perspective of idiosyncrasy. That worry would develop into Part I of the Star of Redemption, which argues that irreducibilities of humanity, divinity, and materiality disrupt any claim to encompassing reality in a complete, exhaustible system of uniform identity. Rosenstock-Huessy worries about the immanence of each part (monadism) taking the whole into itself as its own unique, precious achievement. Immanence means to Rosenstock-Huessy sectarianism (including paganism and Judaism) and also the strictly scientific approach to science, without reference to external standards of judging value and worth. By “social monism” or what he labels Confucianism and pragmatism, Rosenstock-Huessy captures a driving force of capitalism: through some mechanism like an invisible hand, one’s own self-interests will ultimately coincide with the others’. Each thinker therefore accuses the other of excessive immanence and insufficient transcendence; each champions the means of survival for salvation, but wants to distance that kind of survival as a means from survival for its own sake, as a putative end in itself.

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Judaism Despite Christianity By 1916, Rosenzweig viewed philosophy and revelation less as antagonists striving to replace one another than as partners cooperating in the advancement of what remained infinitely separate, God the Creator and the nature of creation. Rosenzweig’s answer to the question of how revelation orients philosophy instead of being oriented by it was formulated in this 1916-1917 correspondence with Rosenstock. Rosenstock ignited their fiery exchange in a letter celebrating “the individual character, that is, the meaning of this our life” by addressing Franz with the salutation: “Dear Fellow (Jew + post-Christum natum + post-Hegel mortuum)!” In his own view, Rosenstock’s becoming a Christian did not obviate his being a Jew. Rosenzweig, though, took offense. It seems that Rosenstock should “want to Christianize the ‘eternal Jew,’” Rosenzweig charged, in “a veritable ‘taking of the Kingdom of God by violence.’” Rosenzweig accepted “the militant Church” and its missionary “work on individuals”—however, not one who “is still a member in the body,” but only someone “cut loose from his people” and effectively deracinated “as a Jew.” Rosenzweig rejected what he considered “a Johannine desire to take the world for a mundus naturaliter christianus” which presumably Jewish people’s retrenchment in historically outdated tradition precludes.15 Specifically Rosenstock-Huessy’s equation of the Aqedah and Agamemnon did not agree with Rosenzweig, who contrasts Agamemnon’s conflict of interest between duty and desire, leadership and self-interest, with Abraham’s willingness (in Genesis 22) to forego his inheritance by sacrificing “[his] existence in [his] people.” Whereas Agamemnon was able to sacrifice his own for the sake of his people, Abraham was willing to sacrifice his legacy on earth for the sake of his loyalty to God. As Kierkegaard also points out, the perpetuation of Abraham’s seed through his beloved child could not proceed with Isaac’s death, whereas Agamemnon’s daughter need not live to rescue Troy from imminent defeat. God’s staying of Abraham’s hand at the binding of Isaac aligns Judaism against paganism. Monotheism strives “‘for the redemption of the world,’” and not only a people. The sacrifice of Isaac on Mount Moriah and Christ on Mount Golgotha are similar, but the “remainder of faith” in each takes an opposite tack. Whereas in Judaism the sacrificed child saves the family, in Christianity the sacrificed man saves humanity. Jews call Israel family, and the Christian calls Israel humanity. As a result, the individual Jew—be it Abraham, Isaac, or Sarah—suffers inasmuch as belonging to the family can risk exclusion from values including

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Sittlichkeit (ethical life) and feelings. Only the “Verwaltungsarbeit” (administrative work) of Judaism would “build up the Jews into a united whole and maintain them in their form of life … plain and simple … [to] work as a ferment on Christianity and through it on the world.” To Rosenzweig “it lies within my power to determine whether I as an individual take upon myself the metaphysical destiny”—“‘the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven’”—set before the Jewish people, “whether I want to take the natural call up into the sphere of metaphysical choice.” Remaining a Jew does not demote natural existence, or embrace death, but instead it ritually (hymnically) unifies diversity, whereas Christianity does so historically (eschatologically). He approves Luther’s translation of Isaiah 7:9: “If you do not believe, you do not abide.”16 Inasmuch as Jews alienated from current affairs represent the “memorial of [Christian] incompleteness,” Jewish redemption sustains sacrifice in the family whereas Christian salvation serves the total state its sacrifice. For his part, Rosenstock accepts Rosenzweig’s framing of the problem between Christianity and philosophy. Revelation takes place in and through nature, they agree, however it opposes a rudimentary natural understanding (natürlicher Verstand). The natural world enjoys a (potential) connection with revelation that finite human thought unfortunately obstructs or obfuscates. Referencing the immediacy of sensation and natural consciousness from which Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit departs, this intentional disposition “knows front and back, left and right.” Moreover, it remains contained within itself, protected by an enclosure through which it relates to the outside with no more than analogy. Supposing its position at “the navel of the world … such autonomous knowledge is without standards, supported only by experience.” Natural understanding interprets the experience as “a survival without power (kraftslose Rest),” compared with revelation “through the concept of Above (von oben bedingt).” We cannot understand revelation naturally or naturalistically. What drives natural understanding by the “stagnant and degenerate concept” is a “fear for the destruction of the naïve ego, which constitutes its own standards.” However, “the Logos is redeemed from itself, from the curse of always only being able to correct itself by itself,” from its self-enclosure or immanence. Natural understanding desires taking it all in alone. Yet, “God speaks to us with the ‘word become flesh,’” with divine speech, and not only in “the word of man,” in human language. Hence, “thought has a standard outside itself,” outside nature, while orienting it. Revelation is that place to which Archimedes refers in his famous statement, “give me a place to stand with a lever and I will move the world.”17

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To Rosenstock-Huessy, “All revelation is something that gives us a standard and at the same time it is a sensible, perceptible event...”18 However, that sensible experience cannot reduce into any kind of natural understanding. So, he criticizes the “naïve pride of the Jew” which “separated” the people “until the destruction of the Temple,” when (it would seem on Rosenzweig’s account) “Christianity redeems the individual from family and people through the unity of all sinners.” Contrary to Rosenzweig, Rosenstock does not “find in Christianity the Judaizing of the pagans.” For a “Christian,” Rosenstock parries, “does not indulge in himself” like the member of a people, pagan or Jewish, does. He charges Rosenzweig’s thesis that Judaism possesses with hubris what Christianity desires. For whereas “Abraham sacrifices what he has,” Rosenstock-Huessy asserts, “Christ sacrifices what he is.” Abraham gave away his son; but Jesus gave away his self. By extension, the Jews sacrifice their having to God, whereas Christians sacrifice their being to God. The former precedes and succeeds the latter, in Rosenstock-Huessy’s view.19 Rosenstock-Huessy concedes that Judaism “knows an original union in blood,” or heritage and inheritance. Yet as a result, the Jews harbor “indifference towards the law of growth of the united universe,” its evolution.20 While purporting to nurture creation, Jewish life opposes the independence of a natural universe. A Jewish life that appeals to transcendence and justifies its existence on the basis of a separate reality cannot survive in natural experience. “Just as a people perishes when it can no longer physically defend itself by itself, so too in spiritual matters every people needs the self-sufficient development of its own law of life (unabhängigen Entfaltung seiner Lebensgesetze).” Rosenzweig’s retention of Jewish completeness stands challenged. Rosenstock-Huessy acknowledges the similarity of his critique to Hegel’s critique of the beautiful soul, in Kantian morality, whose purity could never withstand the trials of real life. However, “every power must stand the test of every danger (Jede Kraft muß sich gegen jede Gefahr bewähren)” which life’s law determines for it. There is no unnatural life, however potentially supernatural. “Every living thing on earth carries with the power of life at the same time the powers of self-defense, self-preservation, in brief, of protection and discrimination, the differentia specifica as actual forces within itself (als Faktizität in sich).” For this reason, Rosenstock assures, “Israel will survive all the peoples.” Yet its survival exacts the price of originality. “The eternal Jew is allowed to live at the cost … [of] always borrowing everything that makes life worth living.”21 The measure of “success” in dutifully fulfilling an externally imposed law is not, however,

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the measure of living a worthy life. Rosenstock’s criticism resembles St. Paul’s view that the Jewish view of law as an instrument to achieve salvation is rendered inert by the universal Christian mission to share God’s word unconditionally. Survival is atavism unless salvation would shatter the limits of mortality and refuse to live on borrowed time. Rosenzweig counters Rosenstock-Huessy, who seems to “involuntarily ethnicize (unwillkürlich zu ethnisieren)” the Jews, treating them like any people or nation (goyim). The Jews are no ethnic group or nationality, but rather a de-naturalized body of God enacted through the ritual performance of Judaism. Rosenzweig cites Cicero, Augustine, and Luther to argue that in Judaism survival is saving, sacrifice is sustaining, and the Jews represent the outcome or destiny that guides the nations. Cicero had granted to the State the purpose of its own “self-sustenance (Selbsterhaltung) (salus)” and the maintenance of its citizens’ “fidelity to contracts (Vertragstreue) (fides)” which “inevitably conflict.” Augustine’s civitas Dei renders “impossible any conflict between salvation (Heil) and faith (Glauben).” Rosenzweig underscores the point in his approval of Isaiah 7:9 in Luther’s translation: “If you do not believe, you do not abide.”22 Due to its remaining by offering, Judaism repudiates secularizing the link between salvation and survival, which results in nationalism today and imperialism tomorrow. Withstanding siege, Jerusalem’s defenders hoped for a miracle, that pagans could not expect. In order to prove that faith anchored in an abiding reality is not autonomy,23 Rosenzweig claims he “would need to exhibit Judaism from within, that is, to be able to show it to you hymnically (hymnisch).”24 Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig evidently disagreed on the ways in which revelation and nature connect and conflict. Rosenstock indicated that the personal choice and freedom to reverse oneself, in a conversion or metanoia, enabled one to dispense liberally with nationalisms and xenophobia. Rosenzweig redoubled the distinction between Jewish and Christian revelations that interdependently conquer the pagan nations of the world. The People Israel is a preserve of intimacy and familiarity. Israel refers to “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” as opposed to the nations. The nations refer here to (1) autochthony, born from the earth, undifferentiated masses, and (2) history, born from a moment in time (Christ’s death and resurrection), and differentiated by states. What is the relation between the masses and the states? Rosenzweig and RosenstockHuessy offer novel, noteworthy answers to the question in Jewish and Christian terms. Rosenzweig learned a good deal from this exchange with RosenstockHuessy. On the Sprachdenken, which he gathered from Rosenstock-

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Huessy’s first (1916) draft of the Practical Knowledge of the Soul, Rosenzweig writes: “Bound to speech, truth is grounded in contingent, temporally discrete experience (Erfahrung).”25 Revelation is not only a foreign element scandalously invading history, as Rosenzweig had pronounced in 1913. It is an event occurring within reality, indeed critically so. Rosenzweig, under the influence of Rosenstock-Huessy, now denies that revelation commands “unwillingly” submitting to God’s word in opposition “‘his drives’ (seinen Trieben)” expressed in worldly fashion.26. In a 1917 letter to Rudi Ehrenberg, considered the “germ cell” of the Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig stated pointedly, “Revelation is orientation (Offenbarung ist Orientierung)” for living in the world. “In accord with revelation, there is an above and a below in nature.”27 While “natural” space and time delimit the “middle” in which “I happen to be (man is the measure of all things),” revelation marks the “middle [as] an immovably fixed point.”28 Revelation gives reason its orientation; with revelation’s orientation, rationality gains its rationale, its value. Rosenzweig cites Rosenstock-Huessy in claiming to have discovered a “long sought-after philosophical Archimedean point” to judge whether “one could mark off from all characteristically human knowledge the boundaries of revelation.”29 Revelation does not oppose, but motivates natural understanding or sense experience that propels abstract comprehension. As a result, Rosenzweig worries about nullifying or neutralizing the unique individual by its absorption into a homogeneous totality. He criticizes reason for trying to comprehend everything univocally (in the Star of Redemption, Part I). To reverse the absorption of the individual into the whole, Rosenzweig expresses a willingness to sacrifice the partiality or bias of the individual in the hope of gaining back a higher individuality that intersects with others, (in the Star of Redemption, Part II). Rosenzweig hopes to win the individual back to the community—in the proper kind of whole, whose parts remain greater than it—through the substitution of selfhood for relatedness, from an agent positing world obtaining necessity to the lover offering and the beloved receiving new life.30 Rosenstock-Huessy came at the problem from the opposite angle. Worried about the tendency for each part to deny the whole of relations it engages through speech, Rosenstock-Huessy is willing to sacrifice the wholeness or finality of the universe in the hopes of gaining it back without losing the best part. “Freedom, however, is the most pithy expression for the subjunctive which expresses everything coming to be.”31 Freedom must reckon its own limits, however, in order to make

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room for everything to become possible, and not only for the actual to be rational. Here Rosenstock-Huessy admits Rosenzweig’s influence, specifically in rendering the binding of Isaac. Specifically, Abraham’s willingness to obey the word of God and renounce his primary worldly commitment to progeny put the question of succession into question. For children may be bound by parents, but they must not be slain. Parents do not have that authority; only God does. By extension, the Jews “of the dispersion, whose scattering over the face of the whole earth corresponded to the locally divided loyalties of the Gentiles. By his waiting attitude [that is, waiting for God to stay the hand from murdering the only threat to the father’s power, namely, the son], the Jew made all existing loyalty relative.” Like Isaac, the Jews are “designated a living sacrifice for the whole of life.” Hence, “the loyalty of race is unable to sustain itself.”32 Abraham inaugurates a view to the past for an heir and not a successor, with the “loyalty to loyalty” of obeying God, fulfillment of whose commands putatively repay obedience. The Christian church is a security of anonymity and equivalency, and a risk of difference and uniqueness.

Trust of the Past, Faith in the Present, Hope for the Future In the course of Genesis 22, once Isaac is bound on the altar for sacrifice, the angel of God stays the hand of Abraham, postpones the impending immolation, and promises salvation or, at least, makes survival possible. The retraction of death fructifying; to stay the hand would save a life. How does staying sacrifice save life? Rosenzweig’s substitution of the one for the other hopes to return, to go back, and to start over from the beginning, the origin in which the entirety is contained as yet unfinished. His life and thought travel not in a straight line from life to death, but in a circle from death—into life. (The movement from death—into life propels his Star of Redemption, since those are its first and last words.) To Rosenzweig the points of death and life each turns around revelation, the dialogue call of God to the self. Like that revelatory interruption of the natural, staying the hand that sacrifices the individual to totality for Rosenzweig is the holiday that lifts itself from the flow of workaday life by living within the flow and not by dissecting it. The holiday achieves such completion in its regulation of the irregular, the irregularity of its regulatory state. As he writes in his Booklet of Sick and Healthy Human Understanding (Büchlein vom gesunden und kranken Menschenverstand):

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The holiday will serve as a training school for the every day.... Life is not eternal; it flows from birth towards death…. Only the holidays merge to form the yearly cycle... one sees the stream forever returning on itself.... There is no remedy for death, not even health. A healthy man, however, has the strength to continue towards the grave. The sick man invokes death and lets his self be carried away in mortal fear.33

By contrast, Rosenstock-Huessy’s idea of substitution tends to progress, to jump ahead and leap across the awaiting, or whiling-away, to replace Abraham’s “loyalty to loyalty” of God the father with Jesus’ “loyalty for loyalty” of our children, the Holy Spirit. Thanks only to God, “we are freed from our native limitations.” As Christianity teaches, “we arrive too late at our own freedom for fully wielding its liberating forces ourselves.” Thus, we must give up “the worship of the gods of our days,” for “in paganism, eternal war is the order of the day.” Nor however may we retreat from historical time alongside the “eternalists” who remain “Pharisaic and incomplete.” Unlike Rosenzweig’s Jew returning before its time, Rosenstock-Huessy projects the Christian fulfillment ahead of its own time. “We move in a world at war to bring peace into it.”34 Christianity undertakes a reversal, conversion, or metanoia of life and death. “Pagan natural man begins with birth and lives forward through time toward death; the Christian lives in the opposite direction, from the end of life into a new beginning. In surviving death, he finds the first day of creation before him.” Here Rosenstock-Huessy echoes the befores and afters of Mark 8:35.35 As we see in Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy, the substitution of one for another qualifies both as means and as obstruction to survival. Who saves survival, how, and for whom? To Rosenzweig, the survival of the Jews bodes the salvation of Christianity. As the Jewish home constricts, the Christian empire expands; the Jewish liturgical cycle pervades and unifies what the conquest of the Christian century parses out and divides. Rosenzweig notes how the prayer, “Blessed are you … who has planted eternal life in our midst” marks the foretaste of redemption. In the pre-messianic era of historical progress and eventfulness, the cycle of Jewish liturgy anticipates or, better, prefigures in one people the as-yet incomplete redemption of the world.36 As Rosenstock put a similar idea, “only men’s sacrifices determine whether or when a primal task of mankind will become historical and thus solvable.” What makes speech not only possible, but necessary, is the revolution that makes the sovereign grow, rather than simply change and adjust.37 Furthermore, Rosenstock concurs with Rosenzweig to the extent

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that nowadays “roots, heredity, stability, security … seem to take precedence over the salvation of the individual.”38 Paganism mars both the Jewish trust in the past and the Christian hope for the future. “Leisure is secular because it divides us; [in it] we are dragged eccentrically in this direction or that…. On holidays, a community triumphs over tragedies; a man at leisure idles away his time…. [Leisure is] a movement away from the center of existence into some outlying district…. The holiday is the mortar of society.”39 The holiday grants the individual endurance through change: its brand of survival heralds a more profound, lasting salvation. The individual is the one who crosses the boundaries of the group and creates a new society, or gives an old society new life. The individual does not achieve this work alone, but together with other individuals whose individuality comes from and goes back to those purely social relations. According to Rosenstock’s motto: “I respond, although I shall be changed (Respondeo etsi mutabor).” Speaking carries us forward—together and individually. Consequently, “instead of being subject” of a struggle, or to an authority, writes Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, “the people is sovereign.”40 Rosenstock-Huessy writes, “participation” involves “something which is a sacrifice of more than mind or money” and rather “lies in the investment of one’s life story.”41 For anyone living, the biography remains incomplete; an autobiography is autarkic. With collectivity and individuality, core and limit bound so closely together, the people and the person make sacrifices for the sovereignty of the other. Their futures are unfinished. Perhaps Jesus represents a future unbound. How can the future unbound bring finality to the center of life, the Cross of Reality? Rosenstock writes, “Peace embodies the survival value of the previous catastrophes of humanity.” Laws are “based on allegiance.” Jurisprudence can delimit the terms of citizenship, for instance. However, there is no logical science that teaches us about “the evil conquered by peace.” The dialogue that transpires in education “is a victory over natural differences in the temporal order of men.” “The inner relation of time to consciousness is borne out by this qualification of the temporal order that should go on, if possible, in peace, not in war.” Rosenstock considers his position in meta-ethics to search for “the synchronization of mutually exclusive patterns of behavior.” The “grammar of assent” aims at “the task of supplementing the statute law of any given society with the metanomics that explain and satisfy our enthusiasm for the synchronization of the distemporary, of old and young, black, brown and white, government and anarchy, primitive and refined, highbrow and lowbrow, innocence and sophistication, all at peace, in one human society.”42 We live together in one divided world. Rather than

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harm each of us individually, our divisions identify us collectively. Peace requires going through the dissonance experienced in war. That war provides the means for peace requires (blind) faith, and that peace inspires the end of war demands (open-hearted) hope. (Faith without hope is blind; and hope without faith is empty.) Rosenzweig notes the sentiment in a poem by Judah Ha-Levi that sings of Israel’s imminent ingathering from exile. “Every Jewish generation is divided by [the false Messiah] into those who have the strength of faith to be deceived, and those who have the strength of hope not to be deceived.” At present those with faith are sacrificed “on the altar of the eternal” administered by those with hope. At the end of days, the situation reverses. “Then—and no one knows whether this ‘then’ will not happen even today—then the task of those who hope comes to an end, and the one who still belongs to the hopeful and not to the faithful when the morning of that day breaks, risks the danger of being rejected.”43 Paradoxically, the faith that the not-yet-fulfilled shall not finally destroy the always-already-fulfilled both enhances and yet diminishes any hope for reconciliation. Nor does Rosenzweig signal a dialectical movement toward a final sublation or resolution so much as a shuttling back-andforth between nodes. Superhuman powers will rescue a disintegrating Europe while their secularization will confirm their eternity. Secularization and salvation are not rivals, but companions.44 Speech not only gives meaning to life, it gives life to meaning. In speaking, infinity precedes meaning and orients it. Rosenstock-Huessy writes, “To speak means to re-enact cosmic processes so that these processes may reach others. In every sentence, man acts within the cosmos, and establishes a social relation for the sake of saving the cosmos from wasting acts in vain.”45 In saying you, a self or I gains an orientation that the other gives, thereby saving the other from its abandon to otherness and negation.

Conclusion Rosenzweig took his decision to “remain, therefore, a Jew” to radiate like “a star of redemption” through a “new thinking” that prompted the sacrifice of sovereignty for time and the other. Rosenstock-Huessy took his motto, “I respond although I shall be changed” to move from the center of the Cross of Reality into the multiform lives of humanity through a “grammatical method” that demonstrated the sovereignty of sacrifice in truly speaking the familiar “you (Du).” Each thinker in his way gives pause to consider how territory and terrorism, the peace of respected

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borders, and the war of antagonistic forces both depart and intermingle through history and across geography. History and geography in their views are not rigid or static; they are dynamic and malleable realities, shaped and deformed by healthy and sick language. Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy propose therapies in the appropriately observed holiday to remedy the illnesses we suffer from accepting the sovereign without sacrifice and from making a sacrifice without sovereignty. For the holiday emblematizes peace. As Rosenstock comments near the end of his Christian Future, “Peace is the victory over mere accident. Peace is the rhythm of a community which is still unfinished.”46 Gregory Kaplan is the Anna Smith Fine Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA.

CHAPTER ELEVEN THE STUBBORNNESS OF THE JEWS RESOURCES AND LIMITATIONS OF THE JEWISH-CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE OF ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY AND ROSENZWEIG

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of tolerance and pluralism are, in our world, quite often objects of unhesitating praise. And yet, it very much remains an open question whether these modern values are commensurable with older, entrenched world views and religious traditions that prize truth and absolute values rather than diversity and recognition of finitude and fallibility. In our daily life, it is almost inevitable that we deal with other people who hold beliefs and take part in practices that we, at least in theory, find to be in significant tension with our own values. And yet, on the level of negotiating the toils of daily life—the demands of the day, as it were—these differences rarely seem insurmountable. However, when it comes to a more speculative level, regarding how to understand our relationships with other people who not only do not share the truths we hold to be sacred, but willfully reject these views for ones we consider to be patently false, immoral, or even idolatrous, such negotiations still have a long way to go. What is so engrossing about the series of letters between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig preserved in Judaism Despite Christianity is that we see two young, highly intellectual thinkers bitterly divided over religious issues, struggling to square their theological beliefs with their personal friendship, without bowing to the daily pressures that so often require us to suppress differences, rather than to acknowledge them and their implications openly.1 Finding an answer to historical relativism in revelation, the two thinkers, one Christian and one Jewish, each seeks in his own way to reconcile theology with philosophy and philosophical sociology with Heilsgeschichte—the history of the divine’s interaction with human beings. In this essay I explore the JewishHE CONTEMPORARY VALUES

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Christian dialogue between Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig in Judaism Despite Christianity as a way to examine their subsequent respective articulations of the Jewish and Christian roles in the progression of history. I conclude by arguing that while their respective methodologies are fundamentally flawed, the work of both thinkers nevertheless continues to offer resources that have relevance for contemporary thought.

Kant and the Question of Orientation To understand the Jewish-Christian dialogue—or really, disputation— between Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig, one must understand the backdrop to these letters. It is not simply a matter of the harrowing circumstances of their status as soldiers fighting in World War I that shaped the character of these letters. Indeed, if anything, this situation makes the erudition and care demonstrated here astonishing and almost unfathomable. Of central importance is that each thinker is, and has been for some time, engaged in a struggle with what Paul Mendes-Flohr terms “the crisis of historicism,” which he explains as “the question of meaning in history and the dilemma of historical relativism.”2 Historicism seems to preclude the absolute from obtaining any purchase among actual human beings, given that there is nothing other than particular individuals with particular beliefs and values that are irreducibly grounded in historically and culturally specific situations. In short, with the collapse of faith in the rational teleology of history, coupled with the proliferation of knowledge about other cultures and their divergent worldviews and respective systems of value, it appears that all that is left is contingency, all the way down. Both Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig agree that human reason— that is, “mere” philosophy—is ensnared in the relativizing effects of historicism, and as a result is unable to overcome this crisis. Thus, despite their religious differences—Rosenstock-Huessy’s Christianity and Rosenzweig’s Judaism—both men agree that only revelation from a transcendence that breaks into history, without compromising its absoluteness, can provide a solution to their generation’s present philosophical / spiritual turmoil. Given the nature of the crisis, it is understandable why Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig are so often viewed in relation to Hegel’s grand system, or more specifically, situated as two thinkers, “post-Hegel mortuum” (to use Rosenstock-Huessy’s own felicitous expression).3 That is, they are thinkers living in the wake of the death of Hegel and, more important, his project. However, in regard to their view of revelation, it will be fruitful in this investigation to juxtapose

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their philosophical and theological positions briefly in relation to Kant’s attempts to domesticate this same phenomenon, as a way of subordinating it to reason. Despite the ongoing debates about Kant’s theistic commitments, there can be no question that Kant not only distrusted, but systematically devalued, revelation. Kant, writing before the crisis of historicism, but whose religious and political writings in many ways adumbrate it, finds in human reason, at least when it is made aware of its own limits, the moorings to resist any relativism.4 Only moral reason, and that “religion” grounded thereupon, can provide true universality and necessity. The dictates of the moral law, the ends that the autonomous individual recognizes and toward which he or she acts, is nevertheless “in systematic connection” with “a whole of rational beings as ends in themselves as well as a whole of particular purposes which each may set for himself … Thus there arises a systematic union of rational beings through common objective laws.”5 Autonomy, as the self-willed subjection to the lawful rulings of rational morality itself, is (or will be) the foundation of a universal intersubjective unity since the moral imperative is shared by all rational beings.6 When it comes to revelation, or any sort of supersensible knowledge, Kant goes to great lengths to stress its limitations. For Kant, any sort of event that falls under the category of “revelation” is necessarily contingent and therefore utterly untranslatable to those in other geographic locations, cultures, and religious groups, whereas moral reason belongs to all human beings on an a priori level in their capacity as rational agents. Sources of revelation, even if one were to grant their veracity, are “grounded solely on facts,” such that they “can extend [their] influence no further than tidings of it can reach,” given that they are “subject to circumstances of time and place.”7 In short, revelation lacks the very conditions for the possibility of necessity or universality. Thus, even if such events were possible (although I think it is safe to say, Kant does not believe them to be) they lack the force of rational claims, and thus do not have the same sort of legitimacy.8 As if in open defiance of the great Aufklärer, Rosenstock-Huessy, in Letter 13 in Judaism Despite Christianity, posits that “All revelation is something that gives us a standard, and at the same time it is a sensible, perceptible event…”9 Rosenzweig echoes this sentiment in his famous “Urzelle” to the Star of Redemption, a letter written to his and RosenstockHuessy’s mutual friend, Rudolf Ehrenberg, in which he explains that revelation is “the particular, the event,” which serves as a fixed middle point whereby the limiting concepts of infinity’s “beginning and end” are

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transfigured into “creation...[and] salvation.”10 That is, where Kant sought to discredit revelation as inherently particular and contingent, and therefore as inferior to reason with its universality and necessity, Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig stress the particularity and contingency of philosophy. Even when practiced with Kant’s rigor, mere philosophy, according to Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig, is ultimately finite and thereby tainted with the arbitrary, given that it is ultimately rooted in the particular human being with his or her egoism and fear of death.11 In response to Kant’s attempt to relativize revelation via a purified account of reason, Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy would agree that Kant’s vaunted pure Vernunft, which captivated many subsequent generations in some form or other, is itself but a mere manifestation of a particular human being living in a specific culture, and thus can no longer claim to be necessary and universal. To be sure, revelation may be “grounded solely on facts,” such that it “can extend [its] influence no further than tidings of it can reach,”12 but it is all that is left from which to find orientation. And besides, given their schooling in Hegel (even if they find his system to be no longer compelling), both Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig think there is much to be said for the role of history in the gradual spreading of the “tidings” of the divine Truth.13 To be sure, Kant’s confidence in pure reason appears unwarranted today. Even contemporary Kantians like John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas do not support his thick understanding of rationality, which claims to account for its own universality and necessity in regard to the right and the good. If Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig are right, and it is revelation, not reason, that provides an orientation and thus solves the so-called crisis of historicism, the solution raises new problems as well. Given the sheer alterity of revelation, there is little room for negotiating with religious Others—that is, with those who subscribe to different accounts of revelation. Thus, even though Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig see eye to eye in regard to the nature of revelation, the two, belonging as they do to separate—albeit intertwined—religious traditions, find themselves at odds over the specific content of revelation. That is, despite their remarkably similar philosophical influences and views, and their strong mutual influence on one another’s thought, the two find themselves disagreeing, often bitterly, when it comes to the nature of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. We find this tension over the content of revelation acutely expressed in their debate about what they term “the stubbornness of the Jews” in the letters preserved in Judaism Despite Christianity.

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The Stubbornness of the Jews What makes the debate between Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig of continuing interest for us today is that both thinkers make a move of great philosophical daring as they attempt to deal with each other’s arguments. Not only do they have recourse to revelation as an immediate inbreak of the divine, which provides a firm orientation in an otherwise chaotic and relativistic world, but both thinkers also resist the urge to remain within the sphere traditionally and often exclusively associated with revelation: namely, theology. Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig resist any fideism; instead, the two, each in different ways, attempt to marry philosophy AND theology, thereby forging a dialectic of sorts between divine immediacy (revelation), and mediation (philosophy), which remains mired in historicism and the crisis it brings with it. In other words, they attempt not merely to find their orientation from the inbreak of the absolute in revelation, but they also attempt to explicate the manner in which revelation provides orientation. In short, by means of recourse to revelation, and in particular, the relationship of revelation to specific communities and their histories, texts, and practices, they attempt to decipher the manner in which the absolute orders the world and its history, which only appears to be mired in meaningless chaos. To be sure this attempt to take revelation seriously from a philosophical perspective has had a fruitful afterlife in both philosophy and theology.14 Nevertheless, it is my contention that given the “fact” of religious pluralism,15 today we are forced to reckon with a plethora of competing and presumably equally plausible, yet mutually exclusive, religious worldviews and sets of practices in a way that neither Rosenstock-Huessy nor Rosenzweig was, their methodology is made significantly more complicated. To be sure, the religious disputes contained in these letters, and which preoccupied other writings of these thinkers, demonstrates an awareness of a certain level of religious diversity. It is my contention that in one respect, Rosenstock-Huessy’s and Rosenzweig’s cognizance of diversity is profound and needs to be recognized as such. However, it is also my contention that the degree to which religious diversity is recognized in the works of these thinkers is insufficient for our contemporary needs. It is important that we explore the controversy between RosenstockHuessy and Rosenzweig over the “stubbornness of the Jews” in the letters contained in Judaism Despite Christianity and its afterlife in the later writings of both respective thinkers in order to discern two levels at work. That is, on one level, as a dialogue between a Christian and a Jew,

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particularly the intense dispute that emerges regarding the status of the “stubbornness of the Jews,” their works profoundly illuminate and explore the relationship that both binds and separates Jews and Christians. Indeed, that the two religions have texts and history in common is the source both of their solidarity, at least more recently,16 and of their bitter tension, in that each wishes to dispossess the other of its legitimacy. However, on another level, precisely what gives profundity to these letters and the two men’s subsequent work simultaneously makes them problematic for today, where we can no longer view the world solely in terms of Jews, Christians, and pagans. In Letter 11 of Judaism Despite Christianity, Rosenzweig remarks that while the “stubbornness of the Jews” is a Christian dogma—one regarding the Church’s historical consciousness of itself—he posits that it is also a Jewish dogma. Rosenzweig claims that this Christian dogma is not merely a cultural-political construct but that it has genuine metaphysical significance even if it largely finds expression only in vulgar hatred of the Jews. Rosenzweig also stresses the theological significance of the doctrine of the “stubbornness of the Jews” as a Jewish dogma that: …has its metaphysical basis… [in] three articles: (1) that we have the truth, (2) that we are at the goal, and (3) that any and every Jew feels in the depths of his soul that the Christian relation to God, and so in a sense their religion, is particularly and extremely pitiful, poverty-stricken, and ceremonious.17

Rosenstock-Huessy responds no less colorfully. The Jews, he contends, only appear to “wait upon the word of the Lord,” when in fact, “they have grown through and through so far away from revelation that they do everything they can to hinder its reality. With all the power of their being they set themselves against their own promises.” The Jews, Rosenstock-Huessy contends, like “Lucifer,” were elect of God, the highest of angels, and fell. Rather than embracing history, which is inextricably bound to Christianity, “Israel stands upon its own … inalienable rights in perpetuity against God, which by nature remain for posterity as properties inherited by bequest, is the relic of blind antiquity in Judaism.”18 Judaism has not only been superseded, but the Jews caused this supersession with their own pride in their (former) status as God’s chosen people. It seems that these two friends’ shared views concerning the overcoming of reason by revelation has not brought them any closer to a shared theology. However much these responses evince a certain unsavory chauvinism, they are nevertheless rooted in careful arguments about

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religious difference, particularly in regard to revelation and the question of the relationship between eternity and history. This has implications for our guiding question of pluralism. Rosenstock-Huessy addresses the crisis of historicism by means of a Christian eschatological reading of history, especially revolutions. Rosenstock-Huessy claims that “progress is the fruit of Christianity.”19 While this might appear problematic at first blush (and indeed, I contend that it remains problematic), it is nevertheless essential to bear in mind that what Rosenstock-Huessy is articulating is not so much a straightforward theological statement as it is a philosophical / sociological claim. Rosenstock-Huessy’s notion of Christianity is not theological in any strict sense of the term since, as M. Darroll Bryant points out, methodologically Rosenstock-Huessy’s interest is not so much on creeds or “the knowing of God in himself, nor the systematic elaboration of the Christian faith, but rather it is the life of humanity in time, the making and remaking of the human race.”20 Wayne Cristaudo describes Rosenstock-Huessy’s religious thought as a “Christianity of non-transcendence.”21 What both scholars are getting at is that for Rosenstock-Huessy, Christianity alone provides the capacity to foster the teleological unity of all human beings, which evolves through a process of living and dying, both literally and figuratively with regard to social structures and with regard to different features of one’s identity. The epochal changes that Christianity initiated in world history are such that there is now an “embodiment of one single truth through the ages.”22 As Cristaudo puts it, “what was unique about the Christian faith was that it was a way of world–making dedicated to bringing all of human kind into one family based upon fundamental truths about suffering, love, death, creation, redemption and incarnation.”23 Rosenstock-Huessy’s definition of Christianity is primarily about the manner of changes in societal structures, historical developments, and the way individuals and communities relate to themselves and each other: It is, at base, as Bryant points out, not about creeds or even God, but rather, as Cristaudo stresses, about the nature of a particular form of world-making. In this reading of history–which intertwines sociology, theology, and philosophy—revolutions are of particular interest. Rosenstock-Huessy views revolutions as not only holy times, filled with dread and horror, but also with great promise. Revolutions simultaneously undo the dead, ossified structures of a society no longer conducive to life, and allow “an inbreak of celestial powers.”24 These powers “bring about the Kingdom of God by force, and reach into the infinite in order to reform the finite.”25 For example, in The Christian Future, Rosenstock-Huessy writes,

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At the center of the Christian creed is faith in death and resurrection. Christians believe in an end of the world, not only once but again and again. This and this alone is the power which enables us to die to our old habits and ideals, get out of our old ruts, leave our dead selves behind and take the first step into a genuine future.”26 That is, Christianity and revolution are inextricably bound up. Christianity “and future are synonymous.27

All of history, not simply the march of the church, is Heilsgeschichte. Underlying Rosenstock-Huessy’s philosophy of history is a theological anthropology. In every generation human beings face God’s “mighty entreaty, ‘Who art thou, man, that I should care for thee?’”28 God calls to the individual human being, and the human being must respond to the great social crises that beset him or her, as the individual knows his or her: … life will have to be an answer to the call…The problem is put to us by a power which far transcends our free will and by situations beyond our choice…We can only try to give a momentary answer, our answer, to the everlasting protean question.29

That is, eternity enters time through revolutions, which through history brings human beings from multiplicity toward unity. Or, as Rosenstock-Huessy put it, “I believe…that man has become more and more natural, more fully all he was meant to be, from the beginning.”30 We can now appreciate with greater understanding what RosenstockHuessy means by the “stubbornness of the Jews.” In Out of Revolution, he moves beyond his earlier triumphalism in Judaism Despite Christianity, claiming that the Jews indeed actually do have a uniqueness to them. That is, they bear witness against the paganism of heathen nations and the paganism still lingering within Christianity.31 However, both paganism and Judaism become distortions that threaten Christianity. Paganism with its idolatry of the past, and Judaism with its overemphasis on the future, both distort. Rosenstock-Huessy writes, “In this antagonism the Jews can exaggerate and the heathen can exaggerate, because God has left them both the freedom to sin. And both are perpetually exaggerating, the one by loving the idols of the past and the other by cherishing its endless hope for the future.”32 Judaism, like paganism, sins against reality; it fails to see the present moment, to heed the call of the present, to revolt here and now. Only in the present can one, presumably, answer the immediate call of God, for “God is taking care of his world from beginning to end, in every age of history, equally.”33 Stubbornness therefore is the Jewish form of idolatry. It is the failure to accept the Jews’ place in history’s evolution

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through revolution. That is, it is the failure to accept the Jews’ place in Christian history.34 Rosenzweig, in contrast to Rosenstock-Huessy, understands the “stubbornness of the Jews” as a positive attribute, indeed as the metaphysical essence of the Jewish nation. Its metaphysical essence, however, is inextricably bound up with Christianity and its metaphysical essence. While the world-historical missions of the two religious communities are ultimately harmonious, the two communities exist in perpetual tension. As Rosenzweig writes to Rosenstock in Letter 15: We are the internal foe; don’t mix us up with the external one! Our enmity may have to be bitterer than any enmity for the external foe, but all the same—we and you are within the same frontier, in the same Kingdom. That is the mistake in your construction, namely that you fight against Judaism as Paganism...35

For Rosenzweig, Christianity is the power operating in the world, conquering paganism; and Christ serves as the point in common, uniting all the peoples of the world together in an eternity in time. All peoples except one—the Jews. Through participation in Christ, all individuals labor in common. Christianity unites all peoples as individuals through belief in Christ, and “directs them toward common action in the world,”36 the spreading of monotheism and concomitantly the breaking-apart of paganism. In Out of Revolution, Rosenstock-Huessy states that the emancipation of the Jews by the French and accepted by Louis XVIII in 1815 ushered in a “new era” for humanity, such that: … the functions of Gentiles, Christians, and Jews are no longer invested in a visible race, a visible clergy, and a visible Israel. In the future the character and function of a man can no longer be judged by the outward signs of race, creed, or country. He has to choose for himself.37

Unlike Rosenstock-Huessy’s vision, for Rosenzweig the Jews exist apart from history, as an ideal embodied in history, but independent of it. As if to challenge this claim directly, even though Out of Revolution was written after he had already died, Rosenzweig writes in the Star of Redemption: …[t]herefore the true eternity of the eternal people [that is, the Jews] must always be alien and vexing to the state, and to the history of the world…. Only the eternal people, which is not encompassed by world history, can—

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History, the story of Christendom, needs the Jews, but the Jews exist apart from and cast silent judgment upon world history as it unfolds. The revolutions of the world may be important to the unfolding of Christianity, to its conversion of the pagans; but Judaism is aloof and apart, having already reached eternity. Whereas Rosenstock-Huessy finds the relation between immediacy and mediation in the divine summons to the individual, in relation to the social structures in terms of which this individual is formed, and against which it toils and revolts, Rosenzweig finds it in the relationship between revelation and the religious communities of Christianity and Judaism. For Rosenzweig, revelation—the immediate relation whereby God turns to the individual—transforms how the individual comes to see the world. This immediate relation between God and the self, which leads the individual toward his or her neighbor, is not only the inbreak of eternity into time, but it becomes the core of both Judaism and Christianity. In this sense, they are not merely two interpretive, religious communities, but rather his solution to the crisis of historicism. Rosenzweig writes, “Judaism and Christianity are … clock faces—both eternal—under the week-[hands] and year-hands of constantly renewed time”39 The inbreak of eternity in time whereby immediacy (revelation) and mediation (liturgical praxis) divide truth between Christianity and Judaism, such that each incorporates and lives eternity differently in time. Rather than philosophical attempts at understanding the All, one lives one’s life in communities that transcend them and that are in touch with an All, transcending all human truths. It is time, community, and liturgy—that is, life, not philosophy—that brings one to truth. The Truth requires both Christianity’s expansion and conversion of the pagans AND Judaism’s ahistorical existence in eternity, casting silent judgment on the oscillations of (Christian) history.

Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig Today The attempts of Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig to overcome the crisis of historicism by means of bridging the yawning philosophical chasm separating the absolute and history demonstrate remarkable ingenuity. That is, both thinkers want somehow to mediate immediacy and mediation, and they both do this willy-nilly through narration that is at once theological AND philosophical. Both Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig use a theologically infused understanding of history involving

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Judaism and Christianity to counteract the crisis of historicism. They seek to infuse what appears to be a secular and therefore merely transitory notion of history with ultimate, religious meaning. This process involves, for both thinkers, the attempt to marry philosophy AND theology, thereby forging a dialectic involving divine immediacy and mediation. Today, the crisis of historicism, against which Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig struggled, has taken on a new shape. In the early twentieth century the notion of revelation as configured in Judaism and Christianity (however idiosyncratically conceived) seemed to offer a relatively straightforward answer to the challenges of historicism such as nihilism and loss of orientation. Now, however, in the wake of globalization and de-colonization, Christianity and Judaism face a manifold of competing religions, each with its own mutually exclusive claim to the absolute. That is, it can no longer simply be assumed that Christianity alone is the religion specially bound to world history, as both Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig do, nor can one simply attribute special significance to the fraught relationship between Judaism and Christianity, as if that is sufficiently taking into account the “fact” of religious pluralism. In today’s world, we can no longer stop with, or simply assume, special significance (positive or negative) for the religions of Judaism and Christianity. In what follows, it is not my intent to discredit the methodologies of Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig so much as to expose them to challenges of contemporary life. The problem with this methodology, at least from our contemporary vantage point, is that we who live in a world rife with religious difference can no longer tolerate a philosophy responsive to only two religious traditions (or three if we count paganism and all the religions and secularisms that get lumped into this category).40 If theology continues to be warranted in making exclusivist and triumphalist claims, philosophy is not. Philosophically, if we are prepared to recognize the possibility of a relationship between revelation (immediacy) and mediation in the “worldmaking” of Judaism and Christianity, then we must also recognize similar capacities in other religious traditions and histories (however different their claims might appear, given their different means of “world-making”). To do anything less is to invite the arbitrariness inherent in chauvinism into our thinking. And simply claiming an eschatological warrant does not protect us from such claims. On the other hand, the philosopher of religion operating out of an Abrahamic monotheistic tradition must avoid the other extreme, that of accepting straightforward religious pluralism. I have argued elsewhere that monotheistic religions are rooted in a sense of election that cannot

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straightforwardly coexist with the common understanding of the contemporary “value” of religious pluralism.41 The works of John Hick and Dan Cohn-Sherbok, which give the value of religious pluralism priority over all else, do not rest easily with the monotheistic traditions from which they purport to speak. Hick, a Christian philosopher / theologian, argues that whereas there are numerous religious traditions that differ widely in their conceptions of the divine, there is nevertheless an underlying continuity across religions and religious experience. As a result, Hick claims that Christians “can revere Christ as the one through whom we have found salvation, without having to deny other points of reported saving contact between God and man. We can recommend the way of Christian faith without having to discommend other ways of faith.”42 In his essay, “Judaism and Other Faiths,”43 Cohn-Sherbok applies Hick’s religious pluralism to Judaism. As a result, Cohn-Sherbok argues that “Judaism thus should not be conceived as the one, true faith for all human beings…Rather, Judaism is true only for the Jewish people.”44 He goes on to conclude that Jews must reject absolute claims about monotheism, election, the special status of the Torah and the Oral Torah, and so on. Such a position forfeits the essential foundations of Judaism, just as Hick’s philosophy of religion forfeits the essential claims of Christianity, making it but one religion among others. In short, both Hick and Cohn-Sherbok make relative every claim to the absolute, at least for any particular religious tradition, including the traditions from which they themselves operate.45 Thus, we find ourselves in a tenuous situation at a crossroads. It is by no means clear that Judaism or Christianity, being monotheistic religions involving some belief in God’s absolute status and some notion of Heilsgeschichte, can comfortably coexist with the “value” of pluralism, if this means giving equal weight to the beliefs and practices of other religions and secularism. And yet, we are citizens and thinkers in a world indelibly marked by the “fact” of pluralism, and which is becoming so increasingly integrated that differences become harder to ignore. It is therefore incumbent upon us to try to think about Jewish and Christian structures respectively in ways that both retain their integrity and also recognize, at least on a philosophical level, the lack of consensus regarding ultimate matters. Again, while from a theological perspective, one can reject nonJewish or non-Christian religions and their histories, neither RosenstockHuessy nor Rosenzweig claims to be simply a theologian. Each moves from the immediacy of revelation to forms of mediation in communities in ways that purport to make philosophical claims about the world. Of

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course, Rosenstock-Huessy is rather open about his Christian eschatological orientation, saying “He who has no trust in the whole can see nothing but mere bricks.”46 Nevertheless, his methodology is not merely that of a theologian. It is to the degree that he works as a philosopher, sociologist, and historian that we are left facing a certain arbitrariness in his choice of ascribing a level of authenticity to revolutions as opposed to other events or forms of life. Moreover, we are left to face his explicit choice to focus primarily on Europe and the United States, neglecting the rest as pagan (with the possible exception of China and India in his later writings), and thus caught up in endless and meaningless cycles of repetition. Similarly in his essay, “The New Thinking,” Rosenzweig offers a philosophically inadequate attempt to justify the special status of Judaism and Christianity. He writes, “The special positions of Judaism and Christianity consist precisely in this: that even if they have become religion, they find in themselves the impulses to free themselves from their religiosity and to leave the specialness and its surroundings in order to find their way back to the open field of actuality.”47 Rosenzweig considers paganism as the only viable alternative to Judaism and Christianity. His discussions of Indian and Chinese religions, not to mention Islam, are so polemical and problematic that they are not worth pursuing as genuine options at this point. Now, as Leora Batnitzky points out, “Rosenzweig suggests that pagans worship themselves, and not God. God’s religion— revelation is anti-religion because it dislodges the human fixation on the human being.”48 Revelation then is a reorientation, an absolute that we experience here and now. Rosenzweig philosophically justifies this, using a method inspired by Schelling, which he terms “absolute empiricism.” As Paul Franks and Michael Morgan explain, “by ‘absolute empiricism,’ Rosenzweig means a philosophy that bases knowledge on experience but does not limit the objects of experience to the relative or conditioned objects of the senses, leaving room for the possibility of experience of the absolute, unconditioned, supersensible, or divine.”49 While I have no necessary objection to absolute empiricism as a method, it becomes troubling to me when it is used as a way to circumvent argument, such that Rosenzweig can simply claim that only Judaism and Christianity have access to this “experience” of revelation. On the one hand, I would have no problem if he followed, say, Menachem Meiri on theological grounds for ruling Christianity as a non-idolatrous religion,50 but then he would be operating on theological principles, not philosophical ones. He would then have to recognize the validity of Islam as well.

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Since he does not explore other religions and their experiences, it would seem the most he could say philosophically is that the experiential content of revelation suggests that only Christians and Jews have access to this orientation. But then he has to contend with philosophical questions such as: “How can one know whether this experience is idiosyncratic to oneself?” and “What if those in other (non-Jewish or Christian) religions and cultures (or even just other people) have different experiential content of revelation or some sort of non-monotheistic equivalent?” In short, Rosenzweig’s absolute empiricism, if it is to be taken seriously, must face a significant challenge raised by Hick’s thought. Hick states, “One must follow the Golden Rule and grant to the religious experience within the other great traditions the same presumption of cognitive veridicality that one quite properly claims for one’s own.”51 Rosenzweig fails even to consider this challenge. To be sure, given the philosophical and cultural milieu in which Rosenzweig wrote, that he does not take such considerations into account is not surprising. However, while Rosenzweig may perhaps be excused on this issue, those of us living today cannot afford to ignore such questions. Hick’s Golden Rule, and questions about potential idiosyncrasy and absolute empiricism extending to so-called “revelatory” experiences of other religions, lead us to doubt or at least to qualify the absoluteness of the revelation of which Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy speak. In short, they do nothing less than re-introduce the same sort of conditions that precipitated the crisis of historicism that led Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig to seek out revelation as a solution in the first place. However, if a theological tool is introduced to solve a philosophical problem, in this case the crisis of historicism, it must be philosophically viable. Thus, ironically, we (those of us who wish to operate as philosophers of religion) find ourselves today forced to bring all claims of revelation under rational scrutiny, and as a result we must mediate the immediate, and make the absolute render an account of itself. In a world post-Hegel mortuum, such an undertaking necessarily requires nothing less than that the absolute forfeit its status as absolute. The curse of historicism is not so easily broken as Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig thought. However, I want to close by saying that even if we are compelled to accept the verdict that neither Rosenstock-Huessy nor Rosenzweig’s recourse to revelation allowed either of them to overcome the crisis of mediation—that is, the crisis of historicism, the contemporary problem of pluralism does not condemn either Rosenstock-Huessy or Rosenzweig to the dustbins of history. Rather, each thinker, albeit in different ways, offers resources for thinking about our present situation, even if we will

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need to perform philosophical reconstructions and retrievals to recover their voices so that they may again speak compellingly to us. To be sure, it is clear that Rosenstock-Huessy’s transfiguration of secular history into Christian Heilsgeschichte is significantly challenged by our present circumstances. However, Rosenstock-Huessy’s thought is by no means left without resources to renew itself in a multicultural, pluralistic landscape, which is in effect what it was dealing with all along. Only now, in the wake of decolonization and globalization, the need to think about other religious traditions with more reflexivity is imperative if one still wants to think through the eschatological and yet immanent unification of the human race. Similarly, Rosenzweig’s notion of bearing witness and messianic verification offer resources for thinking in a monotheistic manner (i.e., not making the sacrifices Hick and Cohn-Sherbok ask of us) in our new pluralistic, multicultural landscape without doing violence to the Other philosophically. In short, Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig, with their attempts to close the gap between immediacy and mediation are a vital philosophical resource for us today and they should not be simply jettisoned to theology, as that would do violence to the sophisticated nature of their projects and it would be a loss to philosophy of religion as a whole. However, for these remarkable thinkers to continue to be useful philosophically for us today, we must not spare their thought in the difficult questions that are facing us. Robert Erlewine is Assistant Professor of Religion, Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, Illinois, USA.

PART III LITURGICAL SPEECH AND DEED: CHURCH, HISTORY, AND EDUCATION

CHAPTER TWELVE SPEECH IS THE BODY OF THE SPIRIT: THE ORAL HERMENEUTIC IN THE WRITINGS OF EUGEN ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY (1888-1973)

(1987) HAROLD M. STAHMER

Editors’ note. This paper was first published with this title in “A Festschrift for Walter J. Ong, S.J.,” Oral Tradition, vol. 2, no. 1 (Slavica, January 1987): 301322. It is replicated here as it appeared in Oral Tradition, except for differences in endnote and reference style. Prof. Stahmer and Oral Tradition’s editor, John Miles Foley, have kindly granted us permission to reprint the essay. See the online archive at: http://journal.oraltradition.org/files/articles/2i/20_stahmer.pdf. All things were made by the Word. In the beginning there was neither mind nor matter. In the beginning was the Word. St. John was properly the first Christian theologian because he was overwhelmed by the spokenness of all meaningful happening. —Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy The evolution of human society and the “hominization” of the world (man's entering into possession of the world, filling it up, becoming the active focus of more and more of its operations) can thus be understood in a basic, although by no means an exclusive sense, as a triumph of voice, of the word, through which man comes to an understanding of actuality and through which he constructs human society. —Walter J. Ong, S.J. The indicator or indicators of illocutionary force implant the meaning in the stream of social intercourse; they are what make speech take hold, and what make language more than the medium of information exchange that philosophers and linguists long seem to have thought it. —J.L. Austin

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}it is significant that the emotional dynamics of the Gospel were always controlled by the meaningfulness of speech. To this, visionary and psychic phenomena were subordinated. And the language in question was not only the spoken word but personal address; it was not only in the indicative mode but in the imperative; it was not only in the third person but in the second and the first; it was not only a matter of declaration but of dialogue. —Amos N. Wilder

T

HE CHRISTIAN SOCIAL PHILOSOPHER, Eugen Friedrich Moritz Rosenstock-Huessy, lived most of his life under the “spell of language”; more specifically under the influence of the Incarnate Word as it manifests itself in and through human speech.1 Hence his description of Man as “reverberating the Word”:

Man is reverberating the Word. How can he do this if he runs away from the first periods of life, in which he should acquire forever the resounding qualities of obedience, of listening, of singing and of playing? These first periods have made me. From them, the power has sprung of giving the slip to anyone outdated later period of style or articulation and to grow up to one more comprehensive....The pages of my Sociology may be those in which I have vindicated these four chapters of my life of the spirit as creating our true time, our full membership in society.2

In 1958, at age seventy, Rosenstock-Huessy was awarded an honorary doctorate in theology by the theological faculty of the University of Münster and hailed as the new “Magus des Nordens” (“Magician of the North”), the J. G. Hamann of the twentieth century. Like Hamann (17301788), Rosenstock-Huessy gnawed continually on the bone of language and for that reason is hailed in Europe as “Der Sprachdenker” (“The Speech-Thinker”).3 Although these two men addressed two radically different social and intellectual climates, the similarities in their writings with respect to the sacramental power of speech are striking. Compare, for example, the following statements by Hamann with one of RosenstockHuessy’s: I know of no eternal truths save those which are unceasingly temporal. I speak neither of physics nor of theology; with me language is the mother of reason and revelation, its Alpha and Omega. With me the question is not so 4 much; What is reason? but rather; What is language?

And for Rosenstock-Huessy:

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And this temporal character of my thinking is in fact the Alpha and Omega from which I grasp everything afresh. Speech reflects this mode of procedure, even for someone who has been influenced by philosophy. For 5 that reason I prefer to talk about speech rather than about reason.

For each, speech (or as Hamann put it, verbalism) constituted a via media between the Scylla and Charybdis of philosophical and theological discourse. Each regarded speech as sacramental and each saw in language the answer to their age’s obsession with artificial and abstract systems reminiscent of the Enlightenment and nineteenth- century German idealism, historicism, and positivism. This paper will focus on the oral hermeneutic in Rosenstock-Huessy’s writings and will attempt to give the reader an insight into the extent to which his lifelong preoccupation with the Incarnate Word and the spoken word, with “speech,” dominated and shaped the substance and style of his written work. It is not uncommon to hear from those reading the writings of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy that they find his style difficult, his selection of topics and themes unusual, and his method and approach to language, time, and history unconventional and hard to classify. These difficulties seem particularly acute for those trained in theology, analytic philosophy and sociology or law. One reason for this is that the breadth of his knowledge exceeds that of most trained in any one of these disciplines. Another is that his approach to each of these disciplines, coupled with his use of concepts like “Grammatical Thinking”(Grammatisches Denken), “Cross of Reality” (Kreuz der Wirklichkeit) and terms like “speech-thinking” (Sprachdenken) and “speech-letters” (Sprachbriefe), is unfamiliar not only to most American scholars, but to those trained in Europe as well. Rosenstock-Huessy admits that his style and writings are as unconventional as was his life. He stated this publicly in one of the last works to be published before his death in 1973, I Am an Impure Thinker (1970). In his foreword to that work, the poet W. H. Auden said that although normally “‘A good wine needs no bush,’ I should warn anyone reading him for the first time … he may find as I did, certain aspects of Rosenstock-Huessy’s writings a bit hard to take. At times he claims to be the only man who has ever seen the light about History and Language. But let the reader persevere, and he will find, as I did, that he is richly rewarded. He will be forced to admit that, very often, the author’s claim is just: he has uncovered many truths hidden from his predecessors." Quoting Rosenstock-Huessy’s motto, “Respondeo etsi mutabor!” (“I respond although I will be changed”), Auden concluded, “Speaking for

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myself, I can only say that, by listening to Rosenstock I have been 6 changed.” In a review in The Modern Schoolman of one of Rosenstock-Huessy’s major writings, his two volume Sociology (1956 and 1958), Walter Ong described him as a member of that group of philosophers whose concerns are with the “human life-world” and whose writings, quoting RosenstockHuessy, were directed “against the decay of time-sense and of the power of speech.” Of his writings, Father Ong admitted that they “are difficult to classify.” He then added: And this is as it should be, for a dissatisfaction with all classification because of the disability it unavoidably entails is a mark not only of Rosenstock-Huessy’s thought but of contemporary philosophy generally. If it is true, as those who are intelligently ill at ease in the presence of classification well know, that we can never avoid it, however industriously we may conceal it, it is also true that man can never again be so smug about classifying things as he rather consistently has been in the past. Philosophy today is spilling out of its old containers, not shrinking but growing, developing a social dimension and cast which is personalist and even poetic and literary. Under these circumstances, it is hard to see how the practicing philosopher can fail to pay attention to Rosenstock-Huessy’s work.7

Before his conversion to Christianity at age 18 or 19, RosenstockHuessy had become aware of the fact that “Language is wiser than the one who speaks it. The living language of people always overpowers the thinking of individual man who assumes he could master it.”8 In 1902 at age 14 it was apparent to Rosenstock-Huessy that language—philology, grammar, writing dictionaries, compiling indexes, translating and studying history—had special meaning for him (“all linguistics intoxicated me”), although he lacked at the time the inspiration and insight into the powers inherent in speech that permeated his later life and writings. In a lengthy autobiographical essay he stated that from 1902 until 1942 “speech made me the footstool of its new articulation ... since 1902 I have lived under the banner of speech.”9 An early sign of Rosenstock-Huessy’s departure from his preoccupation with traditional linguistics was occasioned by the refusal of the law faculty at Leipzig in 1912 to accept a chapter of Ostfalens Rechtsliteratur. Nevertheless, as he put it, “I had braved them, printing the chapter—based on my recognition of speech as creating us—just the same.” In retrospect, it took World War I to end what he called “departmental scholarship.” “The war taught me that professional squabbles were not enough—that the whole world of the educated was embodying a

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spiritual lag.”10 In 1914 Rosenstock-Huessy’s life and style changed dramatically. The onslaught of World War I affected him profoundly. His experiences as a German officer at the Western front during World War I transformed him from a brilliant Privatdozent into an inspired Christian revolutionary. He described this change in his major work on history, Out of Revolution: The Autobiography of Western Man (1938): “Any real man behaves in the 11 volcanic hours of his own life as people behaved during revolutlons.” In his “Post-War Preface” to this work and in the chapter, “Farewell to Descartes,” Rosenstock-Huessy outlined his new orientation and the task and challenge that he had set for himself: The idea of this book originated in an experience we went through in the trenches....The attempt to found a new future for the united soldiers of Europe, that is, for its manhood, on the common experience of the World War can only be successful if this generation that was killed, wounded, weakened, decimated, by the War can bequeath a lasting memory of its experience to its children. Scholars cannot demobilize until the World War has reformed their method and their purpose in writing history.12

Its topic, “the creation of humankind,” owes to “the World War its daring to be simple and general. It owes to events that far transcend our individual judgment its rediscovery of what is important and what is trifling in the life of mankind. This book owes to the sufferings of millions and tens of millions its ability to treat the history of the world as an autobiography.”13 And in a concluding manifesto he stated: We post-War thinkers are less concerned with the revealed character of the true God or the true character of nature than with the survival of a truly human society. In asking for a truly human society we put the question of truth once more; but our specific endeavor is the living realization of truth in mankind. Truth is divine and has been divinely revealed—credo ut intelligam. Truth is pure and can be scientifically stated—cogito ergo sum. Truth is vital and must be socially represented—Respondeo etsi mutabor.14

According to Rosenstock-Huessy it was during the first of the war years, 1914, that he wrote his “first totally inspired book” and “broke away from antiquarianism.”15 The book, Königshaus und Stämme in Deutschland zwischen 911 and 1250, represented his break with traditional scholarly ways of treating medieval legal history just as his later work, Vom Industrierecht, Rechtssystematische Fragen (1926), represented his break with the then prevailing norms in the field of industrial legal scholarship.

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Two Rosenstock-Huessy scholars, Konrad von Moltke and Eckart Wilkens, have traced the interrelatedness of Rosenstock-Huessy’s lifelong preoccupation with language and law, which they document using an unpublished nine-page letter which he wrote while at the Western front on military service in 1915. This letter reveals that in 1915 RosenstockHuessy had begun to develop his “Grammatical Method” and “Cross of Reality” which are based upon a recognition of the power of speech and which constitute the methodological framework for his two-volume Sociology (Soziologie I: 1956 and Soziologie II: 1958), a work that appeared earlier in a limited edition under the title Cross of Reality. According to Konrad von Moltke, “Even without giving a name to the Four as a form of orientation, of revelation, Rosenstock-Huessy puts the grammatical method to work in the area most readily accessible to him, in law … in writing under the pressure of the situation in the field of battle.”16 The historic oral foundations of the Germanic as well as common law traditions fitted in quite well with Rosenstock-Huessy’s early preoccupation with language. It should be noted that his interest in law did not arise originally out of his interest in language, inasmuch as he took up the study of law at his father’s urging in order that he could be independent and selfsupporting. Nevertheless, the centrality as well as the evidentiary role of the spoken word and oral tradition in law fascinated him. Again, quoting von Moltke: In the Germanic legal tradition—as in common law tradition—the spoken word occupies a very special place. Indeed, originally the written word had no evidentiary value without oral confirmation. Thus, the spoken character which is so typical of Eugen’s work can also be seen in terms of his legal training. It is even evident in the most academically oriented of the seven works discussed by Eckart Wilkens, Vom Industrierecht, Rechtssystematische Fragen (1926) (On Industrial Law, Issues in Legal Systematics). The themes which were already audible in the sketch of 1915 and in the article of 1918, the application of the Four, the Cross of Reality, to unexplored domains of law, are also evident in this work.17

Already in 1910 a group of young intellectuals, one that included Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) and may have included RosenstockHuessy, had come together in Baden-Baden out of their concern about the “spiritual lag” in German universities and their fear that these concerns were signs that all of Europe was facing an impending catastrophe, a fear which, in Rosenstock-Huessy’s words, was at the time “communicable to a few friends only.” For many who shared these concerns, the problems they faced had to do with speech and the inability of individuals and

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professional and social groups and organizations to communicate with one another. It is therefore not surprising that between 1910 and as late as 1930 many of those who shared these convictions produced a variety of works that dealt with language, especially the spoken word, the interpersonal, and programs and possibilities for the restructuring and re-creation of more human and humane communities and societies. For example, there was the Patmos group (1919-23), and those who edited and contributed to the periodical, The Creature (Die Kreatur, 192630). The original members of the Patmos group included Leo Weismantel, Werner Picht, Hans and Rudolf Ehrenberg, Karl Barth, Rosenzweig, and Rosenstock-Huessy. The editors of The Creature were Joseph Wittig, Martin Buber, and Viktor von Weizsäcker (Catholic-Jew-Protestant), and the journal included among its contributors, in addition to RosenstockHuessy, Rosenzweig, the Ehrenbergs, Weismantel, Picht, Florens Christian Rang, Rudolf Hallo, and Nicholas Berdyaev. And while only a few of the authors of The Creature were identified with the earlier Patmos group, they nevertheless shared many of the group’s concerns.18 Although they first met in 1910 in Baden-Baden, and again in 1912, it was not until the night of July 7, 1913 that Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig met again and engaged one another in an intensely personal dialogue. Thereafter, they began a close yet often stormy and antagonistic friendship that lasted until Rosenzweig’s death in 1929. In a letter to his old friend and occasional enemy shortly before he died, Rosenzweig said, “I learn from no one so naturally, so inevitably, so effortlessly, as from you.” (10.4.1929)19 Rosenzweig’s “encounter” with Rosenstock-Huessy on July 7, 1913 and their famous correspondence on Judaism and Christianity in 1916 decisively shaped the lives and thinking of both men.20 Rosenzweig later credited their encounter in 1913 as having provoked in him the seeds of a spiritual journey that caused him to shed his gnawing agnosticism and embrace Revelation, first as manifest in Christianity, and then subsequently as revealed in his “reaffirmed” Judaism. Both men admitted afterwards that they had been under the “spell of speech” during these encounters and each subsequently looked back on these events as living examples of “speech-thinking” and “grammaticalthinking.” What each later wrote about and referred to as his “system” or “method” reflected the actual process by which most of their significant theoretical writings had evolved. Based on their own terminology and reflections, their encounter in 1913 was a “speech-encounter” or “speechevent” (Sprachereignis) and the twenty-one letters exchanged in 1916 were “speech-letters” to one another. Without that correspondence and their previous encounter in 1913, it is doubtful that Rosenzweig would

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have written from the trenches and while on leave his Star of Redemption (Der Stern der Erlösung, 1921) (8.22.1918-2.16.1919) or that RosenstockHuessy would have written in 1924 the cornerstone of his hermeneutics, his Applied Knowledge of the Soul (Angewandte Seelenkunde). In an essay entitled, “The New Thinking” (1925), Rosenzweig states that “Speech-thinking” is the method he employs in his new way of philosophizing and that it was central to writing his The Star of Redemption eight years earlier.21 In a letter to Rudolf Hallo (2.4.23), two years before he wrote his essay, Rosenzweig said that “without Eugen I would never have written the Star of Redemption.” Similarly, RosenstockHuessy said of his 1916 correspondence with Rosenzweig, “This exchange}turned the rhythm of life of both writers inside out. Both had to live quite differently than they had before.”22 He compared their significance to that of “love letters” which have the same effect. The writer of love letters realizes that in the writing of the letter something “new” is learned; “namely, that between him and the recipient of the letter there exists a gaping abyss. The letter is, in fact written to close this abyss.” Thus, when Shakespeare’s Romeo cries out, “It is my soul that calls upon my name,” Romeo “senses, that he already in the past was called Romeo, that first through Juliet's calling of his name the one half of his soul can become whole.” The division within us, powers “that drag us backwards, drive us forwards, paralyse us from without, excite us from within,” are overcome and united, that is, our soul and our name grow together, are united, when “the soul speaks aloud our name.” This unity is achieved by a surrender to the voice that addresses us and a simultaneous “forgetting about ourselves.” As often as this happens, the person becomes the one that he should become. Because neither can we nor should we become ourselves. We can only achieve our destiny by forgetting “ourselves.”23

Rosenzweig himself had experienced the meaning of Romeo’s, “It is my soul that calls upon my name” perhaps as deeply as anyone. He also knew what “speech letters” were all about. On January 16, 1920, ten days after his engagement to Edith Hahn, Rosenzweig wrote to her: Do you know why you were unable at that time to know “the meaning of love”? Because one only knows it when one both loves and is loved. Everything else can, at a pinch, be done one-sidedly, but two are needed for love, and when we have experienced this we lose our taste for all other one-sided activities and do everything mutually. For everything can be done mutually; he who has experienced love discovers it everywhere, its

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pains as well as its delights. Believe me, a person who loves will no longer tolerate anything dead around him. And since love teaches him “not to run away,” there's nothing left him, whether for good or ill, but to love … We never awaken for our own sakes; but love brings to life whatever is dead around us. This is the sole proof of its authenticity. You see, I can no longer write a “book,” everything now turns into a letter, since I need to see the “other.” That is how I feel now in writing the piece on education. Since today I am really at it. Every once in a while I have a fit of laziness because it is mere "writing"—I had rather speak—but I go on all the same and make my pen shout. (emphasis added)24

“Speech letters” are letters that are wrung or even wrenched from the soul out of a desire for wholeness and unity as well as by the need, according to Rosenstock-Huessy of “every healthy person}to get rid of himself, as often as possible.” “Franz” realized this secret when he observed in 1913-14, the time when “Eugen” was writing his “Professorenbuch,” that “Eugen spewed forth this book like a volcano.” And similarly, in Rosenzweig’s life, Little did Franz realize, that the same “spewing forth” would apply equally one day to his own evolving major work, The Star of Redemption. Franz “spewed forth” this encompassing work between the end of August 1918 and February 1919; for which he paid dearly with his subsequent lifeshortening illness } For the trance of inspiration tore him out of his powerful body and he was never able thereafter to find his way back into his body.”25

Their influence on one another was not something either man could have been “aware” of for “awareness” is, in itself, “a very superficial form of spiritual address or communication” that does not “penetrate very deeply under the skin.” The process of change, the “metamorphosis” that occurred to each was the result of the power of speech that forced each partner to rid himself of his old self and to become united and strengthened in his powers in ways that completely changed the quality and direction of their respective lives. Rosenstock-Huessy summarized what occurred to each fifty years later, after half a century of living under the spell of his fascination and preoccupation with speech. To paraphrase the German title of his essay on the “Origin of Speech,” “Im Prägstock eines Menschenschlags oder der tägliche Ursprung der Sprache,” the periodic renewal of speech occurs as new types and forms of creatures are “coined” and “stamped.”26

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In his essay, “The New Thinking” (“Das Neue Denken”, 1925), Rosenzweig elaborated on the qualities of “speech thinking” and stated, “When I wrote the Star of Redemption } The main influence was Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy; a full year and a half before I began to write I had seen the rough draft of his now published Applied Knowledge of the Soul, which Rosenstock-Huessy had sent to Rosenzweig in the winter of 1916 after their correspondence on Judaism and Christianity in the form of a lengthy “speech-letter.”28 In his “Prologue / Epilogue to the Letters—Fifty Years Later,” Rosenstock-Huessy referred to the drama that began in 1913 as a series of acts in the course of which Franz and Eugen were, to use his words, “existentially transformed.”29 Quite accurately, the correspondence was cited by the late Fritz Kaufmann as a veritable model of “existential” dialogue. “True co-existence,” Kaufmann wrote, “in the consummation of face-to-face relationships is no less intensive and forceful for being unobtrusive, a model of non-violence.” Such, he asserted, was the quality “alive in the highly charged controversy between Eugen RosenstockHuessy and Franz Rosenzweig in 1913 and 1916.”30 In retrospect, Rosenstock-Huessy made the following comment about their first significant encounter in 1913 in his introduction to the 1935 edition of Rosenzweig’s Letters: “Much to their own surprise the two partners found themselves reluctantly put under the compulsion to face up to one another in a struggle with no quarter to be given or asked for }For only in this last extremity, of a soul in self-defense, is there hope to realize the truth in the questions of life.”31 His published remarks, those in Judaism Despite Christianity (1969) and Ja und Nein: Autobiographische Fragmente (1968), confirm Rosenstock-Huessy’s convictions that their “speechletters” altered the direction and rhythm of their lives:

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Thus, the biographies of the two correspondents can best be understood as a junction, the one provoking the other. That this is so could be documented very fully indeed, but it is doubtful that any amount of documentation could convince modern humanists, so accustomed as they are to treat biographical facts in a completely individualistic fashion, of the thesis that two men, Eugen and Franz, exchanged life rhythms in the course of their encounter from 1913 to 1918. The arsenals of modern historiography and biography have not yet developed tools for such interpretation. However, this lacuna in the inventory of modern thinking does not impress Eugen very much. After all, the twelve apostles, the four evangelists, St. Francis and St. Dominic, and many, many other groupings represent examples of the interpretation of “individual” lives. Even Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville got under each other’s skins. Franz and Eugen did exchange with each other certain fundamentals of their life rhythm, in mutuality, and—must it be added?—quite unintentionally, in total unconsciousness. Individual purposes or intentions were subordinated to a large extent to a process of re-creation or transformation brought about by a most unwanted, even abhorred, exposure to each other.32

The evidence that these letters shaped their lives suggests that “speech-letters” deserve special consideration as a form or genre not simply of “existence communication” or “dialogue,” but rather as media or vehicles of “autobiographical” or “existence transformation.” Traditionally, letters become interesting and worthy of editing and publication as a means of shedding light on the personalities or published writings of individuals. Letters are seen as a report of some event that has taken place or is in process independent of the letter itself. Seldom, if ever, are letters themselves seen as the forces of transformation not only for the recipient but for the author as well. The influence of letters viewed as “speechletters” on the recipient may also account for works written or produced resulting form the impact of the perceived, appropriated, or interiorized meaning of such letters for the recipient’s existence, whether or not discernible linkages or signs of indebtedness are acknowledged or can be detected. Rarely have letters been considered the kernels or germs of major writings which may or may not have influenced the intended recipient, but which nonetheless profoundly affected the direction and focus of the author’s life in ways that the recipient as well as the author of such “speech-letters” were unaware of. Those involved with theological, philosophical, and literary hermeneutics may one day add to our appreciation of letters as a unique genre of autobiographical or existence transformation. And most certainly Rosenstock-Huessy’s own insights

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should be viewed not simply as autobiographical commentary, but as an example of the application of his own “grammatical method” to this phenomenon. Consider, for example, his numerous autobiographical references to his relationship with Rosenzweig in Ja und Nein.33 Fifty years after his correspondence with Rosenzweig, the period during which his own version of “speech-thinking” as “grammatical method” matured, Rosenstock-Huessy stated that something that he was unaware of in 1916 came to his attention that “bears upon the meaning of all our letter writing” and “eliminates the false doctrines in the literature about conversation (dialogue) and letters.” For “… the prevailing teachings about letters seem to expose the nonsense of our teachers of linguistics in a most devastating way”: In the letters between Franz and Eugen lofty matters were discussed about Judaism and Christianity. However, it may be more important for further generations, what this exchange of letters in itself reveals. Behind the fashionable words “dialogue,” “existentialism,” “involvement,” the main issues always remain unsaid, namely, those which grasp the event in these letters. I ask: what has happened as a consequence to the writers of these letters? What meaning do these letters have on their life histories?34

In the introduction to volume one of his Sociology, RosenstockHuessy states that his style or method is based on the outgrowth of conversations with “friends,” arising out of the “services of friendship.” This approach differs from an individual producing a “system based on first principles” on the one hand and the “essay” approach à la Emerson or Nietzsche on the other. He refers to his sociological method as a “third style” that has resulted in the fact that many who read his writings “}stamp me as unsystematic.” Quoting Goethe, Rosenstock-Huessy refers to his sociology as “fragments of a confession.” “The highest work of art must remain incomplete, if the mask on the face of its creator is not to turn to stone.”35 The importance of the concepts “speech-thinking” and “speechletters” to Rosenstock-Huessy's oral hermeneutic have been noted, but attention must also be given to the concepts “grammatical thinking” and “Cross of Reality,” which are equally central to his oral hermeneutic or “speech-thinking.” As early as 1916 in his “speech-letters” to Rosenzweig and then subsequently in his two volume Sociology, his two-volume “speechbook,” The Speech of Mankind (Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts, 1964), and Speech and Reality (1970), Rosenstock-Huessy refers to “Grammar” as “}the future organon of social research.” The complete breakdown of the German language between 1933 and 1939 made

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Rosenstock-Huessy more convinced than ever that “language” in the form of “articulated speech” is the “lifeblood of society” and that it “...should be exalted to the rank of social research.” The originality of “grammatical thinking” as a method for creating social unity lies in the fact that “}it is neither stolen from theology nor from natural science” and that by using it Roman Catholics and Protestants and Free Thinkers can be united in a “common enterprise.” “Without such a unity,” he maintains, “the revolt of the masses must find the various intellectual groups in a helpless division, as helpless as in the new war....We must discover a common basis for social thinking.”36 In chapter five of Applied Knowledge of the Soul, he attacks those “false grammars” which reflect the dominance of the perceiving “I”— those beginning with “I” as the origin of experience, rather than, as our experience proves, with “Thou.” Not amo, amas, amat, but rather amas, amo, amat should constitute our grammatical posture. It is through the external address early in life in the form of vocatives and imperatives and our response in the form of the grammatical second person that “I” is shaped, and through this process that we become conscious of our “names.” Only after utilizing the grammatical forms “Thou” and “I” do we employ the third person, “he”, “she”, “it”. While the second person is our primary grammatical form, the complete grammar of the soul “appears as an inflection of its grammatical configurations.”37 These grammatical moods are the media through which our grammatical persons are expressed. They are the garb of the soul in each moment of its existence. All grammatical moods and tenses manifest the “soul’s possibilities ... the soul can swing to the melody of becoming just as it may resound with existence’s tune of the rhythm of transformation.”38 Two of Rosenstock-Huessy’s essays in Speech and Reality, “In Defense of the Grammatical Method” and “Articulated Speech,” are especially useful since they illustrate the interrelatedness of his “grammatical method” and his “Cross of Reality.” Within the framework of the Cross of Reality the traditional subject-object distinction represents the “inner” (subject) and “outer” (object) vectors of the spatial axis while “past” (trajective) and “future” (prejective) are the vectors of the temporal axis. The quality or health on each front or vector of life, whether it be that of the individual or society, is determined by our use of articulated speech: “Through speech human society sustains its time and space axes...it is we who decide what belongs to the past and what shall be part of the future. Our grammatical forms in our daily speech betray our deepest convictions ... Society lives by speech, dies without speech.”39 We speak out of need and out of fear; out of fear that decay, anarchy,

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war and revolution will destroy the time and space axes of society which give direction and orientation to all members of society. In order to prevent social disintegration, men reason, pass laws, tell stories, and sing. In so doing “the external world is reasoned out, the future is ruled, the past is told,” and the unanimity of the inner circle is expressed in song: Without articulated speech, man has neither direction nor orientation in time and space. Without the signposts of speech, the social beehive would disintegrate immediately. When speech is recognized as curing society from the ills of disharmony and discontinuity in time and space, grammar is the most obvious organon for the teachings of society.40

By means of this method, we become conscious of our “place in history (backward), world (outward), society (inward), and destiny (forward).” The grammatical method constitutes “an additional development of speech itself,” which fulfills itself in our new powers of “direction and orientation.” Thus, “Grammar is the self-consciousness of language just as logic is the self-consciousness of thinking.”41 Without articulated speech, men neither have one time nor mutual respect nor security among themselves. To speak has to do with time and space. Without speech, the phenomenon of time and space cannot be interpreted. Only when we speak to others (or, for that matter, to ourselves), do we delineate an inner space or circle in which we speak, from the outer world about which we speak}.And the same is true about the phenomenon of time. Only because we speak, are we able to establish a present moment between past and future.42

Rosenstock-Huessy’s style is personal; he is “confabulating” with the reader, extending an invitation, giving thanks to friends who have made this occasion possible. His written style is typical of that of “speechletters” as he and Rosenzweig experienced and described them— unsystematic, incomplete, unpredictable. Like Rosenzweig, RosenstockHuessy is always “speaking” to you when he writes, always attempting to get the reader's attention, to engage the reader in a dialogue or conversation. Quoting a line from a letter of Friedrich H. Jacobi to J. G. Hamann (11.18.1784), Rosenstock-Huessy is saying, “Speak that I may see thee!” Rosenstock-Huessy’s “written” style is controlled by his “voice”; his mind and thoughts are at the mercy and service of “articulated speech.” Whatever difficulties the reader may have in understanding the complexity of the “grammatical method” or the “Cross of Reality” of this “impure thinker,” the problem is often compounded and complicated by Rosenstock-Huessy’s constant attempt to treat the written word as a form

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of “oral address.” Sound calls forth sound, song calls forth song and innumerable books given to friends bear witness by their often lengthy poetical inscriptions to this infectious character of confabulation. I mention this so the reader may see, from this underpadding, that the printed work was not radically different to me from the words spoken or written between friends. Fittingly, letters have played an immense role in my life. The letters printed in Franz Rosenzweig’s volume of letters are a good example of their role in my own existence. Many good books got started as letters. (emphasis added)43

In this connection there are many students of Rosenstock-Huessy and also his son, Dr. Hans R. Huessy, who believe that Rosenstock-Huessy comes through best in his recorded lectures when one can actually listen to his voice. His son has said repeatedly that the best and perhaps only way “to really understand my father is to listen to him when he is speaking,” as, for example, in the recorded lecture, “History Must Be Told,” or in the other more than 150 lectures recorded by his students. For Rosenstock-Huessy, the truly inspired individual, the “enthusiastic” creature in whom God dwells and through whom God speaks, is the God who “looks at us and looked at us before we open our eyes or our mouths. He is the power which makes us speak. He puts words of life on our lips.”44 In Out of Revolution, Rosenstock-Huessy proposes a sequel to Michelangelo’s painting of God creating Adam in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. God, in the upper right-hand corner, is shown creating Adam, reclining naked and helpless, in the lower left hand corner. In the beginning, all of God’s angels were on God’s side, contained in the folds of his robe. Rosenstock-Huessy’s proposed sequel would portray the angels having left the Creator and descended to man, “keeping, strengthening, enlarging his being into the divine. In this picture God would be alone while Adam would have all the Elohim around him as his companions”.45 This is consistent with Rosenstock-Huessy’s Johannine millenarian portrayal of Christianity. In the third millennium, the Age of the Spirit, “the New Jerusalem” is envisioned as “a healing of nations without any visible Church at its center”. “I believe that in the future, Church and Creed can be given a new lease on life only be services that are nameless and incognito”.46 In another place he states that, “In the third epoch, beginning today, Christians must immigrate into our workaday world, there to incarnate the Spirit in unpredictable forms”, since “}each generation has to act differently precisely in order to represent the same thing. Only so can each become a full partner in the process of Making

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Man.”47 Early in The Christian Future: Or the Modern Mind Outrun, in a section entitled, “Let us Make Man,” Rosenstock-Huessy elaborated on this theme: Hence the third article of the Creed is the specifically Christian one: from now on the Holy Spirit makes man a partner in his own creation. In the beginning God had said, “Let us make man in our image” (Gen. 1:26). In this light, the Church Fathers interpreted human history as a process of making Man like God. They called it “anthropurgy”: as metallurgy refines metal from its ore, anthropurgy wins the true stuff of Man out of his coarse physical substance. Christ, in the center of history, enables us to participate 48 consciously in this man-making process and to study its laws.

Rosenstock-Huessy’s style, his oral hermeneutic, is totally consistent with Professor Amos Wilder’s statement that “the founders of Christianity used the language and idioms of the people: not a sacred or holy language, nor a learned language, nor did they encourage an ecstatic language ... The common language of men was itself the medium of revelation”.49 Shortly after that Professor Wilder states: There is, indeed, such a thing as a rhetoric of faith, the language of the Spirit; one can recognize that the early Christians were endowed with new tongues; but all such heavenly discourse remains rooted in the secular media of ordinary speech. Pentecost, indeed, we may take as a dramatization of the fact that there is no peculiar Christian tongue.50

For Ernst Fuchs, the Gospel, the “Good News”, is fundamentally a “speech-event” (Sprachereignis). According to Fuchs, “...Jesus wrote nothing and adds that even Paul wrote reluctantly. When he and other authors of our New Testament writings did write or dictate, their speech still has a special character, since the new depth and freedom of speech perpetuated itself even in the written productions. The voice of the writer is the voice of the speaker to a remarkable degree.”51 Harold M. Stahmer is Professor Emeritus of Religion, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN GRAMMAR ON THE CROSS PETER J. LEITHART

I

NSPIRED IN PART BY THE OBSESSION WITH LANGUAGE in modern philosophy, theology has recently been negotiating a “linguistic turn.” Fergus Kerr has sketched out the contours of a theology after Wittgenstein;1 Kevin Vanhoozer’s work in hermeneutics and theological method employs speech-act theory;2 and John R. Betz has published a book and several articles on the great Sprachdenker, J. G. Hamann.3 In a somewhat different vein, James K. A. Smith has formulated a series of theological responses to the challenges posed by postmodern treatments of language.4 Alongside these developments, biblical scholars have given increasingly sophisticated attention to issues of language and hermeneutics.5 In this frenzy of work, one important precursor to the linguistic turn of theology has gone almost entirely unnoticed, namely, the GermanAmerican thinker, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. Rosenstock-Huessy’s grammatical sociology has been the subject of one book-length treatment, but that book is now two decades old and, helpful as it is, does not begin to exhaust the richness of Rosenstock-Huessy’s writings on language, and does not highlight some of the most important theological implications of his work.6 An overtly Christian thinker, Rosenstock-Huessy developed his sociology from the categories of grammar and theology, challenging modernity’s rationalisms and reductionisms along the way. His work is worthy of fresh attention from a new generation of theologians. This essay does not pretend to examine every aspect of RosenstockHuessy’s writings on language, speech, and grammar. Instead, I highlight several central themes of that corpus, and show how language participates, according to Rosenstock-Huessy, in the Cross that he sees as the central reality of human life.

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Grammar and Social Crisis Two main passions drive the whole of Rosenstock-Huessy’s work on language. First, he aims to heal the breach that has opened up in Western humanity during the modern period. He describes this breach in various ways, but in one dimension it is a war between science and theology. Rosenstock-Huessy offers grammar as the master science that can unite theology and science in one overall framework. His reasoning is this: Language is the main medium of social exchange, and grammar is language come to self-consciousness. Thus, grammar has a right to be considered the master social science. Since both theology and natural sciences are social practices, mediated through language, they are legitimately considered as branches of grammar.7 This might seem to be a demotion of theology to a subordinate place beneath grammar but what Rosenstock-Huessy is aiming for is a promotion of theology to the full rank of a science. Simultaneously, the grammatical method places limits on natural science, demonstrating that natural science is only the science of spatial reality rather than a science that encompasses reality.8 One of the premises of this argument is that science is dependent on articulated speech: Only when we speak to others (or, for that matter, to ourselves), do we delineate an inner space or circle in which we speak, from the outer world about which we speak. It is by articulated speech that the true concept of space, and that it is being divided into an outer and inner sphere, comes into being.9

Rosenstock-Huessy is aiming at three things here. First, he insists that speech makes space meaningful because speech articulates and interprets space. Until we speak, we have not clarified what realm natural sciences are going to deal with. Science thus is subordinate to grammar. Specifically, second, articulated speech divides an individual (“I”) or corporate “inner space” (“we”) from the “outer space” about which we talk (“they” or “it”). Contrary to Cartesian conceptions, space is not mere external extension, but is dual—inner and outer—and this reality is evident in our grammar. Science, third, has its say in the realm of outer space, and this means that “the space of science is a posteriori, and just one half of the complete phenomenon of space.” The human character of space is not evident in this outer realm, which we confront as an “it.” The “truly human phenomenon of space is found in the astounding fact that grammar unites people within one common inner space,” as we form social relations by speaking to one another.10 In this way, Rosenstock-

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Huessy seeks to humanize natural science, and to show that it has a legitimate, but limited, sphere of operation. Theology is, by contrast, a temporally oriented science. It is concerned with the historical events of incarnation, cross, and resurrection, and by emphasizing man’s response to God’s call and command, and man’s transformation as a result of that call, it is focused on the temporal dimension of human existence. As a temporal science, theology is as dependent upon articulated speech as the spatial natural sciences. Like space, time becomes articulated through human speech, through grammar: “It is we who decide what belongs to the past and what shall be part of the future.”11 In short, through the grammatical method, Rosenstock-Huessy intends to show how his socio-grammatical slogan, Respondeo etsi mutabor, encompasses both the medieval theological credo ut intelligam and the modern scientific cogito ergo sum.12 Along similar lines, Rosenstock-Huessy proposes that elevating grammar to the master science challenges the primacy of Greek abstract logic that has dominated Western thinking for centuries. For RosenstockHuessy, the primacy of logic is a grammatical phenomenon, the primacy of the indicative. With the Greeks, the indicative, in the form of “This is an answer,” has dominated logic and philosophy, and through logic and philosophy, all forms of thought. Other moods of speech are considered derivative, or are forced to conform to the indicative. But the triumph of the indicative, of “This is an answer,” is arbitrary. The Bible, RosenstockHuessy suggests, discards this Greek logic entirely. Instead of granting primacy to the indicative, the Bible deals in imperatives, interrogatives, optatives, and narratives.13 Unlike other moods, the indicative detaches the speaker from the listener and from reality. An indicative does not require the presence of the speaker or the hearer in the way that the other forms of speech do: My sentence “he is answering him” is much more specific about my own person than the other: “this is an answer.” The pure brain is free to say the latter sentence. The whole man—legs, arms, rump, and brain—must exist in the same place and time for the former. The speaker of the sentence “this is an answer” is an abstract being.14

Far from being the starting place for logic, the indicative “This is an answer” comes at the end. Syntactically, the indicative is originally used for legal judgments, which are delivered at the end of a trial in which all the other forms of speech have been offered.15 Further, this secondary form of speech, the indicative, does not operate on the raw material of

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experience, but always assesses facts that have already been articulated in other moods: “Nobody can tell a tale without exposing the listener to all the associations which accompany every single word. … All data is historical and therefore told by somebody to somebody else.”16 Semanticists, logicians, and mathematicians, who deal in indicatives, are “gravediggers” of speech; they can only deal with speech after it is already dead. The grammatical method enables Rosenstock-Huessy not only to challenge the colonial ambitions of the natural sciences and modern rationalism, but the modern myth of pure objectivity. Rosenstock-Huessy’s second driving interest is his conviction that speech provides the means for integrating the often conflicting demands of human life, individual and social, which he describes in terms of what he calls the “Cross of Reality.”17 All human beings, Rosenstock-Huessy argues, are stretched out in a cruciform human experience, an experience that always involves the agony of being pulled in various directions at once. The Cross of Reality has a horizontal axis, which represents time, with past and future at the ends, and a vertical axis, which represents space, with inside and outside at the two poles. We live our lives in the center of this cross. We have obligations to the past that must be honored, but we are equally obligated to respond to the call to form a new future. Both demands are legitimate, and living well means dancing gracefully between them. Time as humanly experienced is always the product of the past and future, never a simple, present moment. Spatially, experience is divided between an inner realm of thought and desire and an outer world, and socially between an “in-group” and an “out-group.” Both our desires and the world outside us make their legitimate demands, and if we want to remain sane, we have to find some way to integrate these imperatives. Both our in-group and out-group lay obligations on us, and we have to find some way to unite these demands, if we are not going to be torn apart by the Cross of life. Rosenstock-Huessy employs this model in many ways, among them as a tool for analyzing the main forms of social crisis. Social evils, he says, can be reduced to four main types: war, revolution, anarchy, and decadence. Each of these is a crisis in regard to one pole or axis of the Cross of Reality. Anarchy is a crisis inside the closed circle of the community, while war is a social crisis between the inner group and strangers.18 War and anarchy occur along the vertical axis of the cross, along the border line that “like the skin of an individual animal, cuts the world of space into two parts, one inner, one outer.”19 Crises can also occur along the temporal axis. “Decadence” or “tyranny” is a failure of the older generation, the past, to initiate and inspire the young, the future.

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Decadence occurs when elders “do not have the stamina of converting the next generation to their own aims and ends.” It “means to be unable to reach the future, in body or mind or soul. The decadence of an older generation condemns the younger generation to barbarism. Decadence of parents leaves children without heritage.”20 “Revolution” occurs when “the future generation does violence to the existing order and to the people formed in and by the past. The old are ‘liquidated,’ ‘eliminated,’ because they are considered ‘past men’.”21 Rosenstock-Huessy describes these social evils as failures of speech that can only be healed by renewed speech. Wars occur when speech ceases between one group and another; peace is established when “people who have not been on speaking terms, begin speaking again.” Decadence occurs when “the old no longer have the enthusiasm for teaching the young their own faith,” and only a renewal of teaching can heal decadence. Anarchy is a “lack of unanimity, of common inspiration.” Though the same words are used, “the words (like justice, welfare, commonwealth) do not have an identical meaning among men.” When revolutions occur, “all the language and traditions of the past are devaluated like an obsolete currency.”22 In every case all the social evils “hurt language,” and they must do so because “language is the weapon against those four social ills.” The four evils “dismantle society” by destroying one of the corners of its fortress, but “all speech defends these four fronts.”23 As this shows, Rosenstock-Huessy has a fairly expansive notion of what “speech” involves. It includes chat, but also all other uses of language, including song, prayer, judicial sentencing, legal declarations, performative utterances, etc. Four “styles of speech” in particular heal the four diseases of language and the four crisis of social order: Men reason, men pass laws, men tell stories, men sing. The external world is reasoned out, the future is ruled, the past is told, the unanimity of the inner circle is expressed in song. People speak together in articulated language because they fear decay, anarchy, war, and revolution. The energies of social life are compressed into words. The circulation of articulated speech is the lifeblood of society. Through speech, society sustains its time and space axes.24

Relations with the outside are re-established through reason; the future is secured by legislative speech; men tell stories to preserve the past; and we sing together as a way of renewing mutual inspiration, to breathe the same breath together.

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Rosenstock-Huessy’s second driving motivation is his sense that human society is torn apart by failures of speech, by failures to embrace the full range of speech and its full power. These failures of speech are not, in modernity, accidental, but arise from some of the fundamental premises of modern thought and the fundamental habits of modern social life. He proposes the grammatical method not only as a means for healing the antinomies of modern thought, but for healing the ills of modern society. He aims to demonstrate the political importance of grammar by displaying speech on the Cross of Reality.

Grammar and the Soul Before examining speech on the Cross directly, we need to highlight a few other assumptions and implications of the grammatical method. One of the main assumptions is that modern linguistics, and modern philosophy, go off track from the outset by making the Ego the center of philosophy, linguistics, or psychology. As Rosenstock-Huessy explains in his early essay, The Practical Knowledge of the Soul, this view is embodied already in Greek grammar, which makes the “I” the “first person.” As he points out, “all our experience teaches us exactly the opposite of this Greek premise, that the single ‘I’ is primary.” A child develops by “gradually stak[ing] out its borders as an independent entity,” by siphoning out the “thousand cares, impressions, and influences which surround, flow around, and beset it.” What a child first recognizes is not a world, nor father and mother, but “that it is spoken to”: “It is smiled at, entreated, rocked, comforted, punished, given presents, or nourished. It is first a ‘you’ to a powerful being outside itself—above all to its parents.”25 Goethe said that a father is always his daughter’s first god; RosenstockHuessy agrees, adding that “He is so because he is present for his daughter before her own ‘I’ is, and because he bestows on her the consciousness of herself, by addressing her as ‘you’.”26 Before we can articulate anything about our own existence, we hear “others say that we exist and mean something to them.” Thus, “we develop self-consciousness by receiving commands and being judged from outside. In the face of these commands and judgments, we perceive that we are someone special, and being something different or special is the fundamental experience of the ‘I’.”27 We become Egos in response to commands. Hence, the original mood of our social speech is not the indicative but the imperative. And the first person of social speech is not the grammatical first person, but the second person of personal address. A child may describe himself in the third person (“he”), but in response to a command, he is forced to a Yes or No.

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In these answers, the child realizes himself as an individual: “These two words are only apparently mere interjections. Actually, they are expressions of the truly divine ‘I’ personality, the foundations of the omnipotence given us. To say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ means to create and resist, to suffer and to create suffering.”28 In sum, All self-recognition, all of an “I-s” self-knowledge, is produced by summons, by an individual’s definite feeling that a concrete challenge has hit home. His childhood gods want, as do those of his father and mother, or of anyone else. … The imperative may erupt from unexpected sources, but it is always the imperative which forces a soul to come forward and which unfolds its powers into the realm of the body as well as that of the spirit.29

Rosenstock-Huessy makes large claims for grammar and his grammatical method, and one might be tempted to think that he is using the term grammar in an extended metaphorical sense, as George Lindbeck does when he speaks of doctrine as a kind of “grammar.”30 But Rosenstock-Huessy literally means grammar when he writes about grammar as the master science. As noted above, he wants to tease out what our grammar says about language, since language is the binding power of social relations, and grammar is language come to self-consciousness. He complains in various places about the way grammar is taught to schoolchildren, and suggests ways in which our teaching of grammar distorts and veils the social reality and power of speech. He complains particularly about the “Alexandrian table of grammar” that every beginning Latin student employs: amo, amas, amat, etc. The problem with this is that “all persons are put through the same drill. They all seem to speak in the same manner.” But the notion that “all these sentences can and should be treated as of the same social character” is a “fatal error.”31 It is not true that we can string out first, second, and third persons in a line, as if each were socially and personally equivalent: “In our modern society, amo and amas are treated as though they too were mere statements of fact as amat.”32 In reality, the social consequences of amo and amas are radically different from the social consequences of amat.33 We may utter amat or amatur without any stake in the sentence we utter. In fact, these can be uttered only by someone outside the relationship of love, only by someone for whom the love spoken of is, or has become, powerless. Third-person discussion of love, Rosenstock-Huessy says, is “no small achievement” as it “neutralizes the power of love.” If we speak of God in the third person, we attempt something similar with Him: “God in prayer, God in the ten

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commandments—is the living God. God as the object of theology is powerless, a mere third person.”34 Rosenstock-Huessy emphasizes that the negation involved in the use of the third person is a double negation. It not only abstracts the speaker from his speech, but abstracts the listener as well. An objective statement “is a two-fold negation of relationship.”35 In a third-person utterance, neither the speaker nor listener is involved in the truth or falsity of the statement. Bill and Ted might debate the truth of amat concerning Al, but Bill and Ted are relatively indifferent regarding the outcome of the debate. Only when we recognize this double negation can we see “the abyss between the objective third person in amat and the two conversing people who exchange their views about him as subject and preject.”36 Amo, on the contrary, is risky business because it involves both speaker and hearer. Whenever we say amo, we admit that we are involved in the action or passion of which we speak. We cannot say “amo” without a self-commitment, in an offhand, detached way. Saying “amo” is a confession, and anyone who speaks that way “runs a risk which he does not run in speaking of somebody else! He runs the risk of destroying the act to which the sentence testifies.”37 A man who says amo risks interference—from a rival, from parents, from the law, or sometimes, as with Lysander and Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, from all three at once. A man who acts as he speaks runs the risk of being stopped in his act.38 Not only is amo riskier and radically more self-involving than amat, but it is also an act on the social world in a way that amat is not. A report that says “amat” does not change anything, but simply describes what is already the case. The third person is conservative. But “the speaker of a sentence in the first person cannot help changing his own social situation simply by divulging any act, thought, feeling, intention of himself.”39 Because of the risks, amo tends to be uttered in the safety of a private space, where the lover is protected from immediate interference.40 To utter the first person, one must break through a natural reluctance to express what is within. To utter a second-person sentence, we have to break through the hearer’s reluctance to hear. To speak a sentence in the second person is always to assume an office; there is inevitably an implicit hierarchy in saying “you.” Even if the “you” is as simple as “You have bad breath,” it assumes that the speaker has some authority to speak, or the statement will be greeted with a response ranging between indifference and a punch in the snoot: “Why is advice unasked for never given successfully? Because it has no power to unlock the recipient’s ear.”41 To utter a second-person sentence, we have to convert the hearer into a listener.42 In sum,

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…the speaker of amo has made up his mind to break his silence about himself although this means running the risk of intervention. The listener of amas has made up his mind to invite interference. The speaker and listener of amat have nothing to readjust in their own political attitude before they listen to this fact. They are neither defying nor inviting interference in their own affairs.43

All three types of statements are debatable, but in different registers: “whereas amat is debatable as to truth, amas is debatable as to authority, amo is debatable as to wisdom.”44 We cannot use the same standards to evaluate the three types of utterances; “truth-value” is the right standard for the third person, but not for the first or second.45 Against the centurieslong reduction of dialectic to third-person indicatives, Rosenstock-Huessy sketches a dialectic that is multiform, three-dimensional. The social sciences are off-kilter, Rosenstock-Huessy argues, because of “the false dogmas planted in the grammar school and high school,” because the social and political contours of real language are flattened out into a grammatical table. As soon as students become self-conscious about language, they are trained in wrong views of human society, and Rosenstock-Huessy argues that “it is simpler to tell the truth from the beginning” by discarding the Alexandrian table of grammar. When we reduce all persons to the third person, we destroy human society: “Human relations thrive where we attribute secrets of communication and loyalties of listening. Human relations die when all our statements only contribute facts.”46 The Alexandrian list teaches children “to believe that I love and you love and we love may be said in a similarly flat voice as he loves or they love.” The result is predictable: “our educated classes have come to deny emphasis.”47 One of the key distinctions in Rosenstock-Huessy’s grammatical sociology is that between names and words. In his brief discussion of this distinction in The Christian Future, he begins with an expression of his horror at John Dewey’s notion that “We have to find another set of words to formulate the moral ideal.”48 What motivates action, RosenstockHuessy protests, is not a “set of words” but a name, a sacred name. Liberalism is paralyzed because it mocks the sacredness of names, but at the same time wants to motivate us to act, and act strenuously, for something. But the only thing that will motivate is a call that confronts us in the “name” of some hope for the future.49 John Dewey and all idealists think that names always function as they do in commerce, but there is an enormous difference between a “Lincoln” car and the “Lincoln” who lends his name to the car. Lincoln became a usable commercial word because in his life Abraham Lincoln combined words and deeds:

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Elsewhere, Rosenstock-Huessy argues that names are not labels but rather “promises and commands, invitations to the bearer and to the spirit invoked upon the bearer and to the community calling the bearer by this spirit’s power.”51 Names are taboos, protecting a “child against abuse by its parents” as “an amulet and a charm.” They are appeals to responsibility. And they are means for offering praise to God.52 A name, like all genuine speech, is always a triune event involving the public, the speaker, and the inspiration that animates the speaker. To name involves affirming the truth of what is said, being willing to stand up for what is said, and insisting that what is said should be accepted by everyone in the community.53 To name is to face the public, to call the one named, and to invoke a spirit that will enable the one bearing the name to fulfill the calling. Proper names, Rosenstock-Huessy suggests, have an imperatival quality, and therefore names form us, just as imperatives do: “A person’s being addressed by his own distinguishing proper name precedes any thinking about himself the ‘I’ may do.” To say I is to become an object to oneself, but that doesn’t occur until we have first been addressed. A “man who is distinguished by a proper name, unlike the classifiable things of the outside world: trees, tables, stones, or houses,” is able to come to consciousness of himself, to resist and say Yes or No. The I is a product of this resistance, but it presumes that the man has been addressed by name.54

Grammar in Four Dimensions Against this background, Rosenstock-Huessy assembles his grammatical material on the four poles of the Cross of Reality discussed above. He begins a phenomenological discussion of the “four responsibilities in speaking” by describing his encounter with a boy across the fence at his home. He called out “OOOOh,” and the boy answered with a “prolonged oooooooooooh.” This exchange was an exchange of sound, but it does not qualify as speech. Why not? Rosenstock-Huessy says that it lacked two essential characteristics of speech—names and answers. For speech to take place, we must have a name of the person addressed, and we must have an answer that is not merely a repetition of what was said in the initial address.55 Analyzing this simple example

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yields two basic principles. First, if speech takes place only by using names and proper terms, then speech is always a participation in an ageslong stream of communication: “We never start all over again when we speak. Because the success of the speech depends on its being ‘proper.’ Proper language yields more power to his owner than property.”56 Speech always flows from the past, which is one end of the Cross of Reality. The second lesson is that speech is never repetition between two speakers, but always involves both “identity and variation.”57 A response, to be a response of speech, must be consistent with the speaker’s intentions: It does no good to argue with someone who has merely expressed his internal desires, or to agree factually with an imperative. The speaker sets the terms of the exchange by the mode in which he gives his initial speech.58 Yet, although the responder must respond in kind, his response can never be mere repetition of the initial speech, else “they are a chorus and not interlocutors.”59 Hence, “Language means the liberty between two people to modulate in complimentary ways one and the same word or idea or topic or language.” Whether strangers are talking about the weather, scholars are debating a point, or an attorney is arguing a case in court, the two sides are always “committed to a ballet which they execute together”: “No party speech, no theoretical innovation, no scientific discovery, no part of any dialogue in the world makes sense if it is not understood as a variation of something the speaker and public have and hold in common, yet as a variation by which the speaker leads into a new future.”60 Speech, all speech, also stretches out to the future pole of the Cross. Already, we are most of the way to seeing grammar on the Cross of Reality. From the two features of his exchange with the neighbor boy, Rosenstock-Huessy draws the conclusion that his speech also expressed a desire (“I wished to attract the boy’s attention”), and that his call was an “external process.” When I speak, my body causes vibrations on the air, which reach a listener’s ear. When these two observations are combined with the analysis of the encounter above, we have four dimensions of speech. Speech is always at all four poles of the Cross of Reality: It uses proper words (past), expects an answer that varies coherently with the address (future), expresses a desire (inside), and is an external process (outside). We look to the four winds whenever we open our mouths: Back to earlier uses; forward to an answer; we express a desire from within; and we initiate an external process, changing the world outside. Every time we speak, “we assert our being alive because we occupy a center from which the eye looks backward, forward, inward, and outward.”61

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This grammatical cross works at several levels, organizing the sociology of grammatical persons, moods, and principal parts. Although there are variations on this model in various works, Rosenstock-Huessy’s basic themes can be summarized as follows: Past 62

Parts

Adjective

Moods

Narrative

Person

First plural

Inside

Outside

Future

Pronoun

Noun

Verb63

Indicative

Imperative

Third

Second

Optative/ subjunctive First singular

As he makes explicit in The Origin of Speech, moods gravitate toward one or the other persons, and these mood-persons gravitate toward a particular mode of language and a particular experience of time:64 Past

Inside

Outside

Future

Time

Dramatic (imperative)

Lyrical (subjunctive)

Epical (narrative)

Logical (classifying)

Person

Second

First

Third plural

Infinitive

These various moods and persons, in turn, are also linked to various disciplines and courses of study. The grammatical method thus comes into its own as the master science: Narrative

Imperative

Lyric

Judging

Tradition, truth

Ethics, goodness

Aesthetics

Science

Loyalty

Movements

Beauty

System

History

Politics

Poetry

Objectivism

Literature

Revolution

Subjectivism

Mathematics

Evolution Liturgy

Skepticism Law

Art

Science

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These charts not only demonstrate Rosenstock-Huessy’s vision of grammar as a master science, but also begin to show how he sees speech as the existential means for integrating the conflicting but legitimate demands of the Cross of Reality. Torn by the Cross, we must speak or else we die. Speech is a response to the crisis of living at the center of the Cross. It is our human cry of dereliction, but in that cry we become whole. As he says, …we speak lest we break down under the strain of this quadrilateral. We speak in an attempt to ease this strain. To speak, means to unify, to simplify, to integrate life. Without this effort, we would go to pieces in either too much inner, unuttered desire, or too many impressions made upon us by our environment, too many petrified formulas fettering us from the past, or too much restless curiosity for the future.65

Poetic this may be, but what does it mean? Rosenstock-Huessy argues that his grammatical method reveals speech as the integrating act of human existence. Through the grammatical method, we human beings become self-conscious of our place “in history (backward), world (outward), society (inward), and destiny (forward).” and becoming selfconscious we are capable of living as integrated beings even while torn on the Cross. Speech itself gives us this direction and orientation, but grammar, which is language come to self-consciousness, provides “an additional consciousness of this power of direction and orientation” available in speech.66 Speaking integrates inside and outside by articulating the boundary between them, and by extending and contracting the boundaries. As we speak, the “outside” world becomes ever more thinkable, incorporate into our inner world. Speech integrates past and future, as the command “come” yields to the past tense “he has come.”67 Language as a whole manifests its integrating and unifying power, since the same language can be used to express desire, to analyze a scientific experiment, to report a past event, or to command a future series of actions.68 Equally, every act of speech integrates all four poles of the Cross of Reality. When we speak, we implicitly appeal to the past, seek to shape the future, put an inner desire out into the open, and make a statement about the external world. Each act of speech makes us a leader (imperative, future), an observer (indicative, outside), an historian (narrative, past), and a poet (optative, inside). Speech thus enables us to “recognize all events in time and space as coherent.”69 Language always contains “scientific, political, historical (or institutional), and poetic elements.” Human beings specialize in one or the other mode of speech, but even in our specialized area (science, politics, history, poetry) we

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speak in all four modes or we fail to be human. To speak is always an act of faith that the demands of the Cross can be integrated, since all language assumes the “unity of all these four types of language.”70 In a brilliant essay analyzing the implications of Augustine’s de Magistro, Rosenstock-Huessy uses teaching as a paradigm to demonstrate how speech articulates and integrates time. Teaching requires a coordination of time, the schedules of students and teachers. For teaching to happen, they have to show up in the classroom at the same time. However, they do not show up as “contemporaries” but as “distemporaries.” The teacher is always “older,” if not in actual age at least in his exposure to the material; the student is always “younger” because he has never been exposed to the material, or because he has not been exposed to it so deeply as the teacher. Old and young are not biological but social facts. The reality of teaching is a sign that time can be synchronized, and old / past and young / future can be harmonized in a third type of time, the time of the classroom. Distemporaries can live together only “if they admit that they form a succession, if they affirm their quality of belonging to different times.” This mutual recognition is what forms the present. The present, whether in the classroom or anywhere else, is not natural; naturally, the “present” is the razor’s edge between past and future, the wisp that vanishes before we have uttered the word. This natural present is not the present of human experience. The human present is a social fact, a social construct, the fruit of the verbal efforts of the old and young, past and future, to coordinate their distemporaneity.71 Speech also integrates life along the spatial axis. By speaking, we dissolve the boundaries, the “skins” that separate insides from outsides. When I express my individual wishes, the boundary between my heart and my listener dissolves, and we form a union despite our spatial division. When a Tutsi speaks to a Hutu in a way that a Hutu can understand, the boundaries between tribe and tribe also dissolve. Speech creates the possibility for the union of individuals into a society, and for the union of societies into a single humanity. None of these modes of language can flourish without the others, and when one or another gains primacy, social and personal evils are inevitable. Scientists and philosophers have expended a good bit of effort in an attempt to reduce all speech to scientific and philosophical terms. Normal language is “imperfect” in their view, because it is full of statements that cannot easily be forced into the mold of indicative factual assertions. So, philosophers and scientists abandon normal speech in favor of mathematics or symbolic logic.72 This “secondary language” of critical

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reflection is useful because it offers the possibility of “re-thinking of the things said before.” But when one is a professional “second-thinker,” one is liable to “superimpose this, his own aim, upon everybody who handles language and condemn all first and primary language as being a misfit.” Thus, scientific and logical language filters out into everyday speech, and language as a whole becomes more analytical.73 This is socially dangerous, as is any effort to impose one pole of the cross of reality on all speech: “A merely scientific, or a purely educational society or a ritualistic society or a poetical society—everyone of them would cease to live.”74 Modernity inhibits this integration because it reduces all speech to scientific, external, indicative speech. But science and philosophy cannot even operate by their own premises, since scientific speech and philosophical speech are never simply externally oriented anyway. We do not live by “reflection or by formula, alone,” but instead find that our language is full of “suggestive invitation”—the imperative “Come” that Rosenstock-Huessy places under the heading of “politics” and “education,” speech oriented to the future. However analytical they aim to be, “the pure scientist cannot help using suggestive invitations.” Scientists are politicians too, since: There is no science without the political and educational act. For the scientific thought is trying to make its way into the world, and that means changing the world, changing society by getting a hearing, being given a chance, getting an endowment, getting students, becoming a textbook, and taking possession of the brains of unsophisticated young people. The actus purus of science makes no sense without the actus impurus of publication..75

Politics (future), in turn, is inherently poetic (inside). Politics and education, oriented to the future, must be refreshed by the influx of inner speech and desire from writers and prophets, scientists and politicians. A political program originates as a poetical dream: “Politics without poetics are a failure.”76 If one or the other of the poles of the Cross of Reality is ignored, if language operates at only one pole, human life can only wither on the vine: The life of mankind does depend on the integrity of all its members to shift between the four ways of speech freely. The liberty of man is to be found in his right to sing, to think, to invite or lead and to celebrate or remember. These four acts cover the four aspects of reality. By these four acts, the artist, the philosopher, the leader and the priest, within every human being,

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The Word on the Cross Although rarely overt, it seems clear that Rosenstock-Huessy’s analysis of the Cross of Grammar, and the integrating power of speech, is at bottom a Christological analysis. Certainly, Rosenstock-Huessy sees Jesus as the integrating Person of time, of all times. Every generation, granted, has to live for itself, “in the spirit of their time,” but without something to bring unity to the ages, “there still would be the arrogance and the disloyalty and the indifference of the last generation towards all the previous.” Jesus put an end to the ancient practice of “ceaseless splitting into new beginnings: …After all these ‘afters,’ all these juvenile ‘waves of the future,’ the mere beginner would still have to be converted into the son and heir of all times.” Through this kind of “conversion,” the seed of a “convergence of all generations” was planted. Jesus “embedded all times, including his own, in one supertime, one eternal present.”78 All men are on the cross, torn in pieces, but “together we may look for a supertime, for the fellowship in which we can relieve each other’s crucial split by solidarity.” Through fellowship among generations, man “can come home.” Supertimes are created by “the faith of every generation,” and this faith is “the simple application of the principle of unlocking the doors between the times as practiced by Jesus first.”79 The whole idea of the “Christian era,” Rosenstock-Huessy claims, is the declaration that “Now is the time” and that “today these prophecies are fulfilled in your hearing”: Jesus became the center of history by being the human soul made visible, the Messiah whom the Jews expected only at the end of history. In this way he introduced the end of time as a directing force in the present. Whereas the Jews identified end and beginning in God and virtually ignored everything in between, Jesus created a historical process in which every year, every day, every present is equally immediate to God because it is equally a meeting point for all the imperfect past and perfecting future. In Jesus the beginnings of antiquity all come to an end and all the ends of modern man make their beginning; the promises of old, to all the nations, are not turned progressively into realizations.80

His death and resurrection made Jesus the “Founder of the Messianic kingdom.” Only by death could He transcend the “old Law” and the responsibilities of a mere child of Abraham. He had only His death

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… to invest in the future, and his great discovery was that the true future is opened up by the power that survives death. In revealing this power he created man’s perfect plasticity on the forward front, his ability to begin anew each day like a new-born child. He redeemed mere birth by revealing it as the fruit of death.81

Jesus is the Word who hangs on the Cross of Reality, pulling the four poles, and particularly past and future, into one united reality, one common present. In His cry of dereliction, the eternal Word shouts the agony of all men, but in that cry of dereliction He also unites all things in and to Himself. Jesus unites me to my world, and unites my group to every other tribe and tongue and nation and people. Jesus the Word is the one in whom, as Paul says, “all things cohere” (Colossians 1:17). In Him are summed up all past ages, and through Him comes an everlasting future. Through the Word made flesh, through divine speech, the Cross of Reality is integrated in one Man. Inspired by that divine speech and the breath of His mouth, filled with the filial speech of the last days, we speak so as to integrate our own lives, lives always still lived out on the cross. Peter Leithart is a Senior Fellow of Theology and Literature, New Saint Andrews College, Moscow, Idaho, USA.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN GOETHE, THE FIRST FATHER OF THE THIRD AGE OF THE CHURCH MATTHEW DEL NEVO

Introduction

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put forward by Franz Rosenzweig in The Star of Redemption that Goethe is the first Father of the third age of the Church. HIS CHAPTER DEVELOPS THE IDEA

In this Johannine Church, shapeless, necessarily unorganised, and hence always dependent on the organised Churches, Goethe is the first of its Fathers.1

Rosenzweig assumes the Joachimite prophetic notion reiterated in Friedrich Schelling in modern times of the three ages of the Church.2 I have explored this notion with respect to global Pentecostalism in my studies.3 Briefly to recap: the three ages of the Church are the ages of Peter, Paul, and John, respectively. The Petrine Church I associate with the Catholic Church. It is under the sign of love, of mother love, hence the patronage of the Virgin Mother of God, who in many churches is more conspicuous than Christ. The Pauline Church is the generic title for beliefbased churches of the Protestant centuries. These Pauline churches are under the sign of faith. The third age of the Church is the age of the spiritled churches. The third age is the age of the Holy Spirit under the sign of hope; it is the Johannine age. Previously I equated the Johannine Church with the global Pentecostal movement of the Spirit. I argued that the Johannine Church (Pentecostal) is as different from Protestantism as Protestantism is from Catholicism. In a nutshell, Protestantism is led by belief, and the churches are based on the confession of faith. Pentecostalism is spirit-led and mission-based.4 In Pentecostalism:

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Chapter Fourteen The church and its leaders belong to the Spirit—the Spirit does not belong to them. They are subject to the Spirit, who is not under their control. The church is under the reign of the Spirit, not the reverse. The Spirit is called the Spirit of Jesus not the Spirit of the church…. God gives us leaders but clericalism must not be allowed to snuff out freedom.5

I argue in the aforementioned article that only if Pentecostalism understands its difference from Protestantism can it understand itself properly and relate to Protestant churches in the right way (dialogically, of course). It is not my view that this is the case, and lacking a philosophical discourse, Pentecostalism is under the sway of Reformed Evangelical theology. This theology is philosophically different from Pentecostal ethos, and is ultimately incompatible with it, and even antithetical to it. Of course, there are lines of continuity between Protestant and Catholic, similar to the lines of continuity between Protestant and Pentecostal in the late Middle Ages. But ultimately the differences are greater now, as they were then, when it was the difference between being Medieval (Catholic) and being Modern (Protestant). Even today, Catholicism needs to keep the Middle Ages in the center of its stage of truth and run its understanding of its place in modernity around that. Not so the Protestants, who can be authentically modern and break with the Middle Ages as much as they like. Today the difference is between the modern age of ideology and the post-Modern age of interpretation.6 In establishing the philosophical foundations of Pentecostalism in this article, we will assume the thesis of the three ages of the Church, as Rosenzweig does anyway, and will look at the question of Goethe as the first Father of Johannine Christianity. This is the kind of Christianity adapted to an age of interpretation such as our own.

Pentecostal Beginnings Discussion of the origins of Pentecostalism tends to be conducted purely historiographically. Classical Pentecostalism is defined around the baptism of the Holy Spirit. While there are precursors to Pentecostalism in the Catholic Apostolic Church in London in the nineteenth century, it is essentially a twentieth-century phenomenon. It is said to start with the revival of Charles F. Parnham (1873-1929) in Topeka, Kansas, in 1901 or with the revival of Joseph W. Seymour (1870-1922) at Azusa Street in an abandoned African Methodist Episcopal church in Los Angeles from 1906 to 1909. The origins of Pentecostalism are traced historiographically to times and places.

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Even with the historiographical reading of origins, Goethe is never mentioned—or even imagined. Rosenzweig’s statement that Goethe is the Father of Johannine Christianity (Pentecostalism, as I read it) is not historiographical, but philosophical. Various astute writers have looked at the theological origins of Pentecostalism. Donald W. Dayton in Theological Roots of Pentecostalism argues for Wesley as the first theological father of the movement.7 Pentecostalism as an outgrowth of Methodism is a common interpretation, and one with which I agree. Amos Yong, in a landmark study, The Spirit Poured out on All Flesh, interprets the origins of Pentecostalism pneumatologically.8 As an aside, rather than pneumatology, the better Pentecostal term is spirituality. Pneumatology is a word that belongs to belief-based Protestant Christianity, because it refers to the Holy Spirit doctrinally, rather than experientially and qualitatively (as spirituality does). However, Yong’s approach deepens and intellectually supplements the historiographical approach to origins. Pentecostal theology is spiritual theology rather than doctrinal theology, as in Protestantism, which tends toward the totalization of systematics. Spiritual theology, on the other hand, is untotalizable, because human life always offers a supplement in reality, allowing for the continuing story upon which, as Joseph Conrad said in one of his Prefaces, the last word can never be said. Spiritual theology is outworked in life, particularly in virtue, and in the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit that build the Kingdom of God. Yong’s work understands this well and is consonant with what we are adding here, but it is consonant from a purely philosophical view, rather than from a pneumatological one. As I have written elsewhere, the philosophical origins of Pentecostalism are “after metaphysics” in Heidegger’s phrase.9 or in Rosenzweig’s language belong to “the new thinking” (das neue Denken).10 Protestantism is still tied to modernism and individualism, but Pentecostalism since the 1950s, and concretely today, is post-modern. Modernism was the age of ideology; in post-modernism ideology breaks down and we enter an age of interpretation. Where philosophy was once dialectical as it battled with different ideologies competing for totalized interpretation, now philosophy becomes legitimately hermeneutical. Pentecostalism is at home in a plural world of beliefs and cultures beyond ideological totalization; that world is also under one banner in which such a final solution is undesirable. Indeed, the very term has become frightening. Post-modernism, as an age without a totalizing meta-narrative, whether of self or of all-andeverything (such as the -isms purport to be), brings a respect for what

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Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in his social philosophy has called the “dignity of difference.”

Introducing Goethe It is worth pausing before we proceed, just to bring Goethe into view. Goethe (1749-1832) was a phenomenal cultural figure—the greatest writer of the German tradition. He is like Shakespeare for the English-speaking world, but much more than Shakespeare. Indeed, it was Goethe’s interest in Shakespeare that reawakened interest in this largely forgotten dramatist across Europe, influencing even the English. Goethe lived in the age of the French Revolution, of Kant and the Enlightenment, yet he cannot be reduced to any school of thought or even contained by the thought of his time. He had excelled, by world class standards, as a lyric poet, novelist, and dramatist. But he was also a geologist, botanist, anatomist, physicist, and historian of science, not to mention the premier critic and theorist of art and literature in the eyes of posterity. He was a diplomat and senior political figure in Weimar, where he was the minister for culture for 40 years. This small town was a cultural center and powerhouse for the whole of Europe, largely due to the presence of Goethe himself. As a politician, Goethe stood for a sense of reverence for others and for life, but not for any particular political position of his own imposingly political times. He somehow stood outside and beyond his time, while in many respects being the complete man of his time. At first blush, the idea that Goethe is the first Father of what we now call Pentecostalism–a movement that is, as Rosenzweig proleptically recognized, “shapeless, necessarily unorganised” seems odd, to say the least. But let’s consider the point of origin. At the origin of Protestantism, of the Pauline years, Luther stood before the Council of Worms and declared that he could not recant what he wrote, but that he stood by it, even if popes, and councils, and the arrayed might of the world amassed a force against him. He put his conscience before God ahead of religious or political power. Luther famously said: “Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen!” Although he made a personal stand, he didn’t stand as a person so much as by what he believed. In doing this, he symbolized something that has characterized the Protestant era and hopefully continues to characterize Christianity: integrity of belief. If Luther represents standing by what you believe, Goethe, by contrast, represents standing for who you are. He does not stand before God and the world like Luther, but stands in God and in the world of culture, purpose, and responsibility. Goethe’s culture, his sense of purpose

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and life, arises from his situation and his sense of the world as a whole. He is not the man of belief as Luther was, but the global citizen, the man of the world. Luther is about what you believe, Goethe is about who you are. In philosophical terms the former is cerebral and epistemological; the latter is ontological, to do with human being and being human. For Luther, Scripture was regarded as a “pure” source of authority and truth that would mediate and, potentially, immediately speak the Word of God to the individual. For Goethe, Scripture cannot be told apart from Church—the community gathered in the name of Jesus, and its story-tradition—quite so easily. For Goethe, Scripture and the people of God are not two, but one. For him, you are judged not by what you believe, but by the kind of a luminary you are to the world. Again, a Church that is a real luminary to the world can contain diversity of persons, and their beliefs will differ because, if we are true to ourselves, we will believe things differently. No two people will believe exactly alike and conformity of belief ends up in brutality and stupidity. Christianity (like life) doesn’t start with questions of belief and knowledge, but with the irreducible belonging-together to each other—of man, and world, and God.

Goethe’s Prayer Rosenzweig opens his discussion of Goethe with Goethe’s prayer: “Give, oh labour of my hands, the greatest happiness that I can finish it!”11 Initially this might seem like a prayer of an individualistic, self-absorbed spirit, but Goethe, as we will see, is instead a figure of love, magnanimity, and generosity.12 Therefore, Goethe’s prayer arises from the sense of destiny he knows is on his life, put there by God, which it is his happiness to complete; and his whole happiness unto death is in this unique work that he is bidden to carry out. Goethe prayed this prayer nightly; for years, it was the prayer of his heart, which shows how the work God would have him do was at the center of his identity. And God answered it in what can only accurately be described as miraculous fashion, given all that Goethe achieved. Rosenzweig asks in Germany in 1920: “What is in this prayer of man for his own destiny? Who is this destiny before whom he humbly bows his free head and before whom his heart falls to its knees?” Rosenzweig’s answer underlines the uniqueness of destiny, which singles out each of us, and here Goethe, as “a lonely individual,” as no one else in the world, not one, can enter the destiny that is ours, given to us, for us. It is part of our thrownness that life is always done in the midst of life, and that there is no pure point from which we step into it.13 Our destiny, in the midst of our

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self, is the most integral part, the part most aligned with our death (“the work of my hands…that I can finish it”). Our work, our contribution, our responsibility is irreplaceable. This is a founding moment for Christianity, equivalent to Luther’s moment at the Diet of Worms. And Rosenzweig, the great post-modern philosopher, writing at the height of modernism, in modernism’s heartland, in Germany, was the first to see it. But Pentecostal Christians operate easily and painlessly on this basis of destining; at least, so they suppose—but are we Goethean enough, yet? Because the other side of the answer Rosenzweig gives to his question is practical. It is easy enough for a modern Pentecostal merely to equate personal destining with natural uniqueness, which is as plain as the nose on your face; but what about the heightening of that uniqueness in the work? What level of sacrifice for uniqueness is made? Jesus made a total sacrifice, we know; Goethe did, too. In both cases, fulfillment was found through the sacrifice, not in it, like the long-sufferer; not by means of it, like the pragmatist or utilitarian person who only suffers “for a purpose.” Through the sacrifice means, in the words of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, that Goethe went under (Untergang) in order to cross over (Übergang).14 Our destining is not about our natural uniqueness, which shows on our faces, but our identity. It is not about the next life so much as this life and the transformation we accomplish here, not just of ourselves (for this is not ours to accomplish, but we are the site upon which it is accomplished) but of the world around us. The prayer to our destiny is therefore akin to what Jesus taught the disciples: “on earth as it is in heaven.” Identity is not just a personal matter—not just qua death—but eschatological, as in fulfilling the promises of our life and pointing to a messianic dimension, a time to come in which our purpose finds its true end. In the passage entitled “Microcosm” in the Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig suggests that the Goethean man, Goethe in particular, in praying this prayer to his own destiny, inserts himself “in the world’s destiny” in a unique way, so that the world will never be exactly what it would otherwise have been. Each of us can make all the difference in the world for the coming of the Kingdom. Each person has in the work of his or her hands a destiny given to none other. Our destining is not a given (any more than it could be a “process”). 15 Our destining belongs to the fact of our uniqueness and that of our situation in life. Rosenzweig writes of this prayer of Goethe, in trying to determine what it was for, that: He is concerned only that whatever comes should flow into his life, that he be permitted to offer everything, what is his own or what is foreign, what is foreign or what is his own, in the sanctuary of his own destiny. For this he prays.16

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Finding Destiny Rosenzweig writes: “This is a great moment in the history of man, where for the first time man thus raises his arms praying to his own destiny.”17 Goethe prays like a Pentecostal, like a man of the Bible, arms raised. The essential humanism (anthropology and psychology) of Goethe’s prayer is of man as a creator, a co-worker with God, or better still, as Jesus called us, a friend. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from the Father. (John 15:14,15)

This is the foundation of the Church in a sense. Jesus has spoken the word, his and his Father’s word, into the Church and established the relation before the passion, crucifixion, and resurrection, which are the completion of his work. But the Church starts before this, with the chosenness of the Christ’s friends and their appointment to bear fruit (verse 16). The connection with Goethe and the third age of the Church is in the humanness of God. This is Goethean humanism, which is not a humanism about man (such was the “Enlightenment” humanism of Goethe’s age) but the humanism of God. Pentecostals can relate to this humanism, because it is a spiritual (pneumatological) teaching. In a late essay translated by Fr. S. Janos, privately circulated and originally published in the Russian Journal Put, Nikolai Berdyaev writes (for this new Goethean humanism is precisely that which Berdyaev’s whole philosophy clarifies): “The humanness of God is a specific revelation of Christianity, setting it apart from all other religions. Christianity is the religion of God-manhood.”18 And further down the page: “The humanness or human-formliness of God is the obverse side of the Divineness or God-formliness of man.” It is in this sense, as I said above, we are thrown in our destining, thrown toward the openness and futurity of our God-formliness, and the God-formliness of the world. This purposiveness is in our responsibility and care for one another. “To become a person is the task of man,” Berdyaev wrote19; and this is the meaning of Goethe’s prayer as well. Goethe, like a character from a novel, must invent and reinvent himself. In this, Goethe is a secular person, like each of us. Yet Goethe described himself at the end of his life as “perhaps” the only Christian of his times (in this, not unlike his younger Danish contemporary, Kierkegaard).20 What did he mean, a “Christian”? He meant that to be

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under Christ is to be under his life, revering his divine life in terms of one’s own humanity. Goethe’s Christianity is a relationship. As such it is experiential. As experience of Christ is the synergy in the wisdom. This is unusual in Goethe’s age, where relationship with Christ could be conventional, spiritualistic—thinking that Christ is operative in every movement of one’s will—or the relationship might be romantic and sentimental, like a relationship with the past or with a dead relative. Goethe’s Christianity was marked by none of these modern relationships. Goethe’s wisdom is proverbial, but it did not derive from what he believed; what he believed issued from this wise man. This is a foreshadowing and prefiguring of spiritual Christians who do not deduce understanding from belief, but who obtain belief inductively from understanding. And in the end it is never reducible to meaning, for life is always in excess of any meaning with which we would try to fix it. At the same time as he declared himself, perhaps, the only Christian of his age, Goethe added, “though you regard me equally as a pagan.”21 There are two aspects to Goethe’s so-called “paganism.” There is the way Goethe understood it, and the way other people understood it, and these two are different. When Goethe called himself a “pagan” it was tongue-incheek, or with a sense of humor tinged with irony. He understood himself under God as a man free to forge his own destiny, with God’s cooperation and without the common constraints or the constraining mentality of institutional Christianity. Goethe was what we would call perfectly secular, and he did not dress himself up or present himself as one who was “religious,” as so many Christians do, now as then. He was totally free of the besetting Christian sin of sanctimony. When others called Goethe a pagan it was because they saw his freedom and they could not understand it. They knew he was not an atheist, but he also was not a Christian in the way they were. So they disparagingly called him Heide, which literally means “a heathen.”22 In the Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig goes on from remarking on Goethe’s paganism to say, in the very next sentence, “In the prayer to his personal destiny, man at the same time begins to feel at home in his Self and just for this reason to be fully at home in the world.”23 In this statement, Goethe was a new kind of Christian that Pentecostals can easily recognize from their own experience as being like them. Goethe stuck to his prayer. I have never known a more presumptuous man than myself. … If they had put a crown on my head, I would have said it is only fitting. And yet precisely on this account I remained a man like everyone else. How I differentiated myself from someone truly insane was only by taking up

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efforts beyond my powers and seeking to carry them through, so as to deserve what came my way without necessarily deserving it. Thus, at first, I was simply an inconvenience to others on account of my errors; later because of my earnestness; but no matter what I did and how, in the end I was always alone.24

Alone, but not like Pascal against a backdrop of infinite space and time; alone because, Rosenzweig says, finding “his own hour in the growing ages of the world,” and “the hour that has struck for him is thus the one that man, praying for his own destiny, grasps.”25 If we are not sure what this could mean, this hour that is most our own, that is a “now” foreshadowing the intimacy and aloneness of the hour of our death, the Bible beautifully illustrates it. Recall the hour when the Israelites must leave Egypt and the danger and futurity of the hour. Think of the circling in the desert, waiting for their hour to enter the promised land. That hour never came for Moses in the end, having had his consummate hour alone with the Alone on Mount Sinai. But Moses passed his hour on to all mankind forever! Think of Mary finding her hour at the annunciation, an hour that again was so decisive for world history. Her hour came at the beginning, but in her song she sees what the mighty one will do, and that his name is holy. Or Jesus seeking his hour, the hour to start ministry; and the hour to ask the disciples who they thought he was; and the hour to go up to Jerusalem; and the final hour in the garden of Gethsemane, which is the most decisive of all in this respect. These Biblical men and women grasped their hour in every case, or they missed it in some cases (and we may think of counter examples, like Saul and so many of the kings). Our destining is uniquely tied into finding our own hour and working in the dark shadow that the time to come casts upon the time in which we stand toward the hour that will be our most our own, as an hour of fulfillment, not just of the work of our hands, but of our days. Our own-most hour is not just related to the hour of our death but to the messianic hour, when the Lord shall come again in glory to raise the living and the dead. It is to this end that Goethe’s prayer and the education of the apprentice-hero of his second novel, Wilhelm Meister, are related. For this hour will not come by itself; it waits on man, on every one of us.

Bildungsroman Goethe’s massive novel, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), is commonly referred to as a Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel. It is an exemplary specimen of a modern genre. It is more accurately described from our point of view as a novel about

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achieving one’s destiny; a book could be written about its theology and the Christology of man from this point of view. Although Goethe’s Faust, which he wrote across six decades of his amazing life, is his most famous and greatest literary work, Wilhelm Meister is not a peripheral work by any means. Along with his popular early work Werther, Wilhelm Meister is central to Goethe’s oeuvre. It is significant too because through it we can see much of the inner side of this public figure who, along with Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, is among a handful of the very greatest writers in world literature. Goethe differs from these others however, because writing was just one of the things he did and at which he was successful! Wilhelm Meister is divided into two parts. The first part, the Lehrjahre (apprenticeship), was published in 1795-1796 in four volumes containing eight books. The second part, the Wanderjahre (travels), or as it is alternately subtitled, “the Renunciants” (Die Entsagenden), was published thirty years later in 1829, in a further three books.26 Wilhelm Meister is a book of life lessons. It is trivialized if we think of it as about a fictional character’s anecdotal adventures of self-discovery. These life lessons are not didactic but experiential, and as readers of a novel we experience them vicariously through the imagination. The reader is introduced in the early books to various characters who make up Wilhelm’s world. Of the people whom Wilhelm is experiencing life with, only he develops. And I think this is Goethe’s point. Mariane loves Wilhelm (though not as much as he loves her, as it eventuates) but in the end she—as well as all the others in Wilhelm’s life—are impotent in achieving the foundation of their self-realization. Most of the early portion of the book shows the other characters’ sentimentality, which is ultimately futile because it is immature, and which robs them of a greater God-given destiny. For a start, they hold wishy-washy dreams of selfhood that lack the strength required for real, God-given destiny. This destiny is always stretching us and calling us to challenge and to make decisions and, as Pentecostals say, stepping out in faith. This is not faith in belief (or beliefdriven faith), as in Protestantism, but action on the basis of the best being yet to come. Such action is the realization of Christian hope (or hopebased faith). The characters around Goethe are inhibited and held back from becoming all that they might be, because they do not derive their sense of God-given destiny from themselves as friends of God. Instead, they see themselves the way others see them, and try to work out their destiny in those terms. Goethe shows that in reducing oneself to other people’s exterior ideas and attitudes, one’s destiny will never be as great as it could have been. While those around Wilhelm either sink under the

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notions and attitudes other people project upon them, which they internalize and base themselves on, Wilhelm grows and develops strength of character and fortune from the romantic effusions and circumstance around him. Rather than being submerged by others or by circumstances, Wilhelm emerges as a forceful man of the world and a man of God. Wilhelm Meister is shot through with the Goethean spirit of lifeaffirmation. This golden thread runs through the pages. It is not what we do, but what we are that is crucial and precious. It is not what I do—my role—but what I am that must come first. And what am I? The whole point of a Bildungsroman is that the answer to this question is not given in advance. There is no recipe. Life is educational. It is not something extrinsic that is learned. Education is authentically about what is educed— that is, across a lifetime of experience, namely, the person in his or her identity. All this is an undercurrent of a continuing drama. Finally (with particular relevance to Pentecostalism), there is the whole notion in Wilhelm Meister of transformation. Today we can accept that there is no such thing as an ordinary person, and Goethe is where, perhaps, we first find this illustrated powerfully in literature. People either find their destiny in God, or not. Sometimes people can be utterly deluged by circumstance. We are not talking about extremes here, but the mainstream. Wilhelm is an ordinary man, as far as Goethe’s story is concerned and as far as the reader understands it. But this ordinary man transforms himself—he is not merely passively transformed—into a man who, by the second part, when he is traveling with Felix, has gained the necessary distance from the petty concerns of daily life. In the doing of it, he has found the emotional maturity to recognize in all these daily concerns and everyday relationships, the connectedness to the larger concern; in our own despairing moments we wonder about this as the meaning of life. In Wilhelm the ultimate questions of why I am here and what am I to do are connected with emotional growth and maturity, and again with the meaning of life. Growth in God is therefore linked with the prayer for personal destiny.

Education and Destiny We will not trace the novelistic incidents here that bring about Wilhelm’s transformation, for that would take us too far toward literary concerns; rather, I just want to make a few more comments along philosophical lines, to amplify this theme of destiny and education, before I pass on to the matter of the three reverences. It is not just a “theme”:

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these are matters—as are the three reverences—that are crucial for life and blessing. And I mean life in the full sense that the Bible puts before us. In the last chapter of Book One, Wilhelm bumps into a stranger and they get talking and go for a drink. The stranger turns out to be a figure from Wilhelm’s past, and is also someone who links back in with the conflict of art and business that has been going on. Basically it is a chance meeting. Wilhelm inadvertently uses the word fate in the conversation and the old man criticizes it. Wilhelm retorts: “So you don’t believe in destiny? In any power that holds sway over us and guides everything for the best for us?”27 The discussion oscillates between two ways of believing in destiny: the stranger’s, which is responsible; and Wilhelm’s, which is not yet responsible. I read here an implicit criticism of spiritual enthusiasm, but without the usual recourse to rationalism. Spiritual enthusiasm refers to the Christian mentality that sees the hand of God everywhere in one’s own life. The stranger is not critical of a sense of destiny as such, but of an immature, sentimental sense of destiny.28 He says, “We delude ourselves that we are pious by sauntering along without reflection, letting ourselves be determined by pleasant factors, and finally giving the result of such a precarious life the name of divine guidance.”29 To this, Wilhelm retorts: “Did it never happen to you that a small circumstance caused you to follow a certain path, on which an agreeable opportunity soon offered itself, and a series of unexpected events finally brought you to the goal which you yourself had as yet scarcely envisaged? Should not this instill resignation to fate and confidence in such guidance?”30 Which interpretation is Goethe canvassing? The answer I think is “Neither, and both.” We do have a sense of following the Spirit and being led by the Spirit in Wilhelm’s sense, especially when we are young, and when that is necessary. But the old man is right, too. We can only “be called a god of the earth”; that is, someone who stands firm in the Spirit, by discerning the authentic; and we can do this only in terms of how things turn out in the end. With respect to personal destiny, only the old person with the benefit of hindsight can see how things turned out. Only he or she, looking back, can say what was a mistake, what was a chimera, what was a blessed opportunity. Overall, Goethe sides with the stranger. Wilhelm’s stance—the stance criticized by the stranger—is like that of Goethe’s religious and scientific friend, Lavater.31 Lavater was a Christian enthusiast, and there was a gap in spiritual maturity between the two men. For Goethe, enthusiasm could not suffice. But neither, for that matter, could rationalism be the remedy. Goethe steers (and would steer us) between over-enthusiasm on one hand and the false pretensions of

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rationalism on the other. Remember here that Goethe lived in the age of the great philosopher Immanuel Kant, for whose writings Goethe had little time. Where would Goethe steer us? As we shall see below, the answer lies with the three reverences. We can put these remarks into a deeper context that we find in Goethe’s autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth): Deep minds are impelled to live in the past as well as the future. The usual business of the world cannot be of importance to them, for they honour prophecies which are revealed in their truth in the unfolding of time and connect them with others which are still concealed in the womb of time. Thereby a continuity comes into being which is precisely what history writing lacks, which only gives us the to and fro instead of closing the circle of what is necessarily consecutive.32

In old age, Goethe often wrote notes about himself; sometimes in his diary, sometimes for public consumption. One of these reads: I was conscious of great and noble purposes within myself, but never understood the conditions under which I was labouring. I knew what I lacked; and I knew where I overshot the mark; and I never stopped with self-education, inner and outer. Yet everything went on as it always does. … And so my life ran its course amid doing and enjoying, suffering and antagonism, love and satisfaction, and the hatred and envy of others. Mirror yourself herein, if fate has reserved something of the same for you.33

Wilhelm is very much a reflection of this. As a novel it also shows the unprecedented nature of every life. Wilhelm Meister belongs to our age because in it every life is potentially an interpretation of God, and every life possibly sheds light on the being of God. Or the opposite might be the case. A life may be such as to detract, obfuscate, or even blot out the divine spark; but the important point is that no life is a fable. In this Bildungsroman nothing is idealized, nothing is just symbolic, nothing is allegorical. Goethe’s art presupposes kind of world other than that of Baudelairian correspondances, in which natural and supernatural correspond in accordance with a given fixed (cosmological) metaphysical order. On the one hand, Creation is not a fixed given in Goethe’s book. Yet on the other hand, his world is not a Dostoyevskian world of farce and tragedy from which a capricious—or surprising—living God redeems us if somehow we can find the connection with Him. There are elements of these worlds in Goethe’s narrative, but his world is more open-ended. It is less reducible to any philosophy or world-

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view. Faust is even more infinite—even more of biblical proportions—in this respect. In the decadent and romantic Baudelairian world of correspondances, where life is full of homologies of another life elsewhere, rather than this life here and now, we may be seen to live symbolic vicarious lives, not our own unique destining. And in this vicarious living, we fall into unauthenticity and loss of destiny. In the Dostoyevskian world we are plunged into a need for redemption—or damnation. This is probably nearer the mark of truth. Yet it perhaps gives too much credit to the demonic powers that plague the human soul. Goethe’s world is not so plunged in squalor and irrationalism as Dostoyevsky’s. Although Goethe would have recognized the foolishness of denying civilization’s heart of darkness,34 he had a lighter touch, like a water colorist on perfect paper, rather than one painting in dark oils on thick canvas. As the author of a Bildungsroman Goethe believes in education and the educability of the soul. His reader does not necessarily identify with Wilhelm, and Goethe continually plunges his hero into the unexpected in such a way as to shake off identifications. Yet the reader might identify in a rough way through the relationships, despite the vicissitudes; and this makes the novel more lifelike. This is how we see ourselves in others and others in ourselves, outside the novel, in our real life. We see ourselves despite so much that would prevent us from doing so in others. To this end, in Wilhelm Meister even the idea of a man needing to “find himself” is not romantic (symbolic) or idealized (allegorical). Of Faust, but also of Goethe’s other dramas, it is often said that he was incapable of writing a real tragedy. I think this is true—he disliked tragedy on the whole, and brought them all at last into a perspective of reconciliation and redemption (Versöhnung and Erlösung). The Greeks and Shakespeare he admired greatly; but they were too tough with their morals, too little imbued with the milk of kindness. And I think it is essentially a quality of his mind that he sees “God” (or the World Spirit or Divine Glory) pervading the cosmos in His kindness. He equates kindness and beauty (this is not the same as forgiveness). Something of this spirit was caught by Thomas Mann in his own Faustus when he analyzed Beethoven’s last sonata. The “air” of the last movement, a plain little song, undergoes some fairly titanic adventures (variations); but right at the end, with all the furore gone, Mann observes that in its last utterance, Beethoven adds one note to the air. And this one note returns the whole character of it to the human sphere: It seems like a soft and consoling stroking of a child’s cheek, a good-bye to all suffering, tragedy, and

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misfortune. I think Goethe would have approved of this (and if he knew the sonata, maybe he did!). Goethe is very much like Wilhelm when he prays to his destiny or mission in the world. He has a glad-hearted and kindly view of existence, in spite of what he sees as wrong. Life isn’t just “analogous to” or “correspondent with” a static second story of the universe, as it was perceived among many Christians of his day. Nor is life a tragi-comic stage, as it was perceived among many non-Christians of his day. Undoubtedly life contains elements of both, but in Goethe it is reducible to neither. Life contains much more. Goethe looks at life. In conversation with Arthur Schopenhauer, arguing in Kantian terms about light, Goethe exclaims: “What? There is light only in so far as one sees it? No: You would not be there except that the light sees you!”35 It is for this reason (and not out of pure humanism, let alone arrogance) that he speaks often of “das Tagewerk das mir aufgetan,” the task (mission) entrusted to me in my life.36 It was something that really annoyed his contemporaries and baffles scholars that he frequently spoke of “merits to which I was born.”

The Three Reverences “There is one thing that nobody brings with him into the world, and yet is it is the key factor enabling a human being to become a complete human being. If you can discover what it is, do say so.”37 This is the puzzle Wilhelm is given in the second part of the novel, where the main characters are called out of their homeland to look for new lives, new livelihoods in a new world, in fact the New World, as they plan to go to America and start a community. Wilhelm sends his son Felix to the “Pedagogic Province,” an educational institution that will fit him for the new world and the new life they will have there. Wilhelm and Felix are part of a group of renunciants (as the subtitle has it) or pilgrims (as the narrative calls them). Reverence is the answer to the question put to Wilhelm. It startles him. It is akin to the saying of Solomon in the Bible, that fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Wilhelm is dropping Felix off at the Pedagogic Province. It has an excellent reputation. The principal is not available to greet him, so Wilhelm is shown around by three men who represent him. They offer some explanation of what Felix is in for if his father leaves him in their care. This is where the explanation of the three reverences appears. The first reverence is for God, the second for the world and its creatures, and the third for each other: God-world-man. These are the three

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reverences that need to “flow together and form a whole.”38 None of this forms a system, and it comes out of a character who is far from perfect, in a novel; and yet there is something essentially “Goethean” about it too, I think. In the story the three men in charge of the institute show Wilhelm around and say this to him, echoing strongly Goethe’s own view: “No religion that is based on fear,” they said, “is esteemed among us here. In so far as man allows reverence to hold sway within himself, he is not in conflict with himself, as he would be otherwise.”39

The men go on to explain that their reverences are the equivalent of three different kinds of religion: ethnic (pagan or indigenous), philosophical (humanist), and Christian (love and forgiveness). Wilhelm says to the three men: “Such a profession of faith, developed in this way, does not appear strange to me…it is in accord with all that one picks up here and there in life, only you are united by what separates others.” The men reply that “the faith is already being professed by a great part of the world, although unconsciously.”40 How and where? asks Wilhelm. “In the Creed!” the others cried out: …for the first article is ethnic and belongs to all peoples; the second is Christian, for those who are fighting with suffering and who have been glorified in suffering; finally the third article teaches us about an enthusiastic community of saints, that is, about those who are good and wise in the highest degree. Should not therefore the three divine persons in whose image and name such convictions and promises have been pronounced, in all fairness be regarded as the highest unity?41

This unusual thought at this point in the novel actually suffuses it. The thought speaks of three ages of humanity, not in a chronological or strictly ecclesiological sense (depending what we understand by church), but in the sense of a spiritual development. The idea of the three ages of the Church, as it emerges through Goethe, is that all spirituality (or pneumatology) is developmental.42 It is in respect of this ethos of Goethe’s work, pinpointed here, that Rosenzweig supposes he is the Father of the third era of Christianity. In a letter to his good friend, the German philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, dated January 6, 1813, Goethe owns: For my part, I cannot be satisfied, amid the manifold directions of my being, with only one way of thinking. As a poet and an artist I am a polytheist; on the other hand, I am a pantheist as a natural scientist—and

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one of these as decisively as the other. And if I have need for one God for my personality as a moral man, that, too, is provided for me.43

This appears published in slightly altered form in his Maxims and Reflections. “When we do natural science, we are pantheists; when we do poetry, we are polytheists; when we moralise, we are monotheists.”44 The personal pronoun has been changed from the first person singular to the third person plural, generalizing it; in English we speak of the “Royal ‘we.’” Jaroslav Pelikan takes this aphorism as an interpretative key to Faust. It is, he says, “a typological framework within which to chart Faust’s theological Bildungstrieb.”45 What both Wilhelm Meister and Faust work out, and what Goethe was working out in them, this Bildungstrieb, was the spiritual impulse of the Creation that is intrinsic to all things—God, world, man—in their only way. Pelikan calls it more simply, “the impulse and instinct for creative development.”46 In that letter of 1813, Goethe speaks to Jacobi of Denkweisen—ways of thinking—appropriate to each: God, world, man. In Rosenzweig’s book the Christianity (lit from within by Judaism) that reverences all three Denkweisen is that of the spiritual age of the Church to come, which we have called Pentecostal. The pantheist, the polytheist, and the monotheist of course are embraced together. Three that “flow together and form a whole.”47 They are inextricable from the three reverences that are introduced only in the second part of Wilhelm Meister. Significantly, the second part of the novel follows the years of Wilhelm’s travels. Symbolically, this shows the spirit that blows where it will, but not randomly; it blows toward the new world, and a new life of gladness. Of course, this is biblical. The men from the Pedagogic Province in the novel tell Wilhelm: Man is reluctant to resolve on reverence, or rather he never resolves on it; it is a higher sense that has to be given to his nature and which only develops spontaneously in the case of particularly favoured people who for this reason have also always been considered to be saints or gods. Here are found the dignity and true task of all genuine religions, of which moreover there are only three, according to which they address their devotion.48

This reverence was Goethe’s secret and his genius. On the basis of it, Rosenzweig sees his importance for the future of Christianity and a spiritled Christianity after the Petrine age of a Mother Church and the belief-led churches of the Pauline centuries.

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From Reverence to Wisdom In the passage of Wilhelm Meister we are examining, the men in the Pedagogic Province say their profession of faith is rooted in the creed—by which they mean the Christian creed—and refer to the creed’s specific articles. The first article of the creed is about God the Father. This, they say, belongs to all people, all humanity. God is Father of all, not just of Israel, or just of church-going professing Christians. The second article of the creed is about Jesus Christ, the only son of God; it is specifically Christian—because none of these reverences could be revealed outside Judaism, were it not for Christ. But the second article is not insular but about lifting the lives of the suffering, lifting up the lives of all people, because all who do not know how to reverence in the way Goethe knew, and as his incomparable art also illustrates, suffer and need God to lift them up and bless them so that they may be a blessing. This work—this Gospel that blesses the pure in heart, the mourning, those who thirst after justice and righteousness, those who are hungry and imprisoned now— will be transfiguring or glorifying, the text says. The third article of the creed is about the spiritual community of those who reverence what is above, what is around, and what is beneath them. This community is led by the good and the wise—that is, by the spirit-filled. The men tell Wilhelm: “Should not therefore the three divine persons in whose image and name such convictions and promises have been pronounced, in all fairness be regarded as the highest unity?”49 Nowhere does Rosenzweig mention or refer to these passages, but he must have thought exactly as Wilhelm himself, when in the next chapter, looking at some frescoes, Wilhelm says to an elder of the Pedagogic Province: “As I see, you have given the Israelite people pride of place and used their history as the basis of this portrayal, or rather you have made it the main subject of the presentation.”50 Fear that is the beginning of biblical wisdom. This fear is translated into “reverence” in Goethe. Goethe was not irreligious—he just hated religion, when it reverenced itself, which he thought it often did. Goethe’s Faust has relationship, not “religion,” at its core. Christianity is meant to be about relationship, and the Bible is all about it, but Christianity has preferred to cast its die as Christendom (Petrine era) or systematic theology or religious ideology (Pauline era); the Johannine era will be otherwise, it will be spiritual. Wilhelm responds on hearing about the three reverences: “Now I can see! That is why most people are in such a bad way, because they content themselves solely with ill-will and hostile talk; people who hand themselves over to these elements soon behave with

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indifference to God, with contempt for the world, and with spite to their own kind; the true, genuine and indispensable self-esteem is destroyed in conceit and arrogance.”51 Goethe was in a sense disappointed with mankind that we are so small, that the only way we can handle the concept of a supreme Creator is to anthropomorphize him and his family of good or bad boys and girls and tell silly stories of which most are in any case the common stock of legend. The world since Christ has not grown up with Christ (Christianized but not Christified). As organized religion Christianity appeals to the lowest common intellectual denominator and ends up in superstition, piety, or fundamental theology, and is therefore outwardly content with the mere formalistic rigmarole of worship. Goethe had the utmost respect for truly wise religious people, like the old mystics and Fathers of the Church, particularly admiring, near his own time, Nicolaus Cusanus, Johannes Kepler, Gottfried Leibniz, and Baruch Spinoza, but being exceedingly dubious about moderns, Kant and Schopenhauer. What ultimately he thought about religion is shown in the interminable growth of Faust through three and-a-half versions across his 60 years of working at it. Scholars disagree on what the last version amounts to, but Goethe admired Pedro Calderón, and it seems to me that the last Faust is an auto sacramental, like the latter’s Gran teatro del mundo. God himself, Christ, and the devil appear in it, together with the whole panoply of angels and saints; it is God’s own “cosmic festivity,” an exhibition not just of his supreme power, but of his supreme will for the good, for reconciliation, redemption, and love. “Das ewig Weibliche zieht uns hinan”52 has little to do with the “feminine,” as such; one could argue for hours or centuries about the deep meaning of Faust, and even of this little phrase, translated: The eternal feminine leads us on. Let me say a few words here about this famous phrase. It is love that represents spirituality in man and woman. But love is the feminine aspect of the soul. As such it is eternal (primordial). Masculine potency (creative nature) is drawn to this “soil” inevitably, magnetically. Hence a fundamental feature of humanity is eternal connectedness of the creative spirit to the receiving spirit of the feminine. In a sense this is the imago of the feminine, of love, as fertilizable and birth-giving. And so, the eternal spirit of femininity draws us to itself.53

Participation in the Divine Nature Participating in the divine nature comes of course from II Peter 1:4. This was among the most quoted verses of the New Testament in the

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Patristic period. Christians believed that in the New Covenant, without Jewish law, the new people of God could directly participate in the divine nature. This is because after Pentecost, the divine nature—the Holy Spirit—was with the Church. This harks back to the quotation from Clark Pinnock near the start of this chapter, which may now be re-read as a Pentecostal recapitulation of the same idea. This is a revelation about man. The revelation of Christ is revelation of the fullness of the Most High— “For it pleased [the Father that] in Him the fullness should dwell” (Colossians 1:19, cf. Romans 15:29; Galatians 4:4; Ephesians 1:23; 3:19). Goethe is the first Father of Pentecostalism because with him starts what we might call, in Berdyaev’s phrase, a Christology of man. This is not a revelation about God, but about me and you. In Jesus we see a revelation of the potential of human beings, because he was “like us in all things except sin” (Hebrews 4:15). The theologian John Meyendorff (1926-1992) brings a Christology of man into view in these words: “A person is truly a person when he or she participates in God’s life. This participation therefore is not a supernatural gift but the very core of man’s nature.”54 If he could walk on water, so can I—at least, this is what Peter thought, and he could! Theologically speaking, a Christology of man means this: that in and through our unique destinies as spiritual brothers and sisters of the son of God—certainly as his friends—we participate in the divine nature. This is basically an inferential idea, not a metaphysical idea.55 Jesus calls us friends (John 15:15) and stands with us and would have us stand with him. We worship the Father (whom Jesus worshipped) with Jesus in the Holy Spirit. This is not to deny the divinity of Jesus, but it is to affirm his humanity and our divine potential in that light. Goethe is the first Father of Johannine Christianity because he sees Christ as both true God and true man, and he refuses to separate the divine from the human as the Church has tended to do at times. It is clear from what Goethe says about Christianity, personal destiny, and reverence, that the divine is not over and above him in some second storey, but intersects him, in his thoughts, in his words, and in his deeds. The way in which we physically participate in the divine nature is given best by the traditional word sacrament, a transliteration of the Latin translation of the Greek word mysterion. When human and divine are working cooperatively, there is sacrament. Goethe reveres the sacraments that the Church traditionally guards: The sacraments are the most sublime part of religion, the physical symbol of extraordinary divine grace and favour. In the Eucharist our earthly lips are said to receive the incarnation of the divine essence, and under the form

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of earthly food to partake of a heavenly one. It has this same meaning in all Christian churches, whether the sacrament is taken with more or less acquiescence in the mystery, or with more or less accommodation to reason. It always remains a great and sacred action, which in reality represents things possible or impossible, things a person can neither attain nor do without. But a sacrament should not stand alone; no Christian can receive it with the true joy it is meant to give unless a sense of the symbolical and sacramental has been nourished within him. He must be accustomed to regard the religion of the heart as completely one with that of the visible church, as the great universal sacrament, which is divided into a multitude of others, but communicates to each of these parts its holiness, indestructibility, and eternity.56

Spiritually, Goethe is traditionally minded, rather than rationalistic like the Reformed Protestant. He writes, “It can be said that the Protestant service in general lacks a rich content.”57 He understands the sacramental imagination because it belongs to a poetic science, a poetic universe, of which reason is a part. He disapproves of the stripped-bare Protestant service because of its lack of art, its aesthetic void. Caught between this difference, the Johannine Church follows the aesthetic way of beauty and glorying God in art and poetry in whatever way it can. Yet despite this Goethe notices the difference between himself—his views—and those of other Christians whom he knew. I mentioned Lavater above, but also, when he was in touch with the Moravian Brotherhood through Susanne Katherina von Klettenberg (1723-1774), a relative and friend of Goethe’s mother, he noticed further differences, not so much of taste, but of temperament. The Moravians were influenced by the Bible translator and saintly figure John Huss, who was tricked, trapped, and murdered by the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the fifteenth century. Huss threatened Catholic power by making the Bible available to ordinary people through vernacular translations, thus representing a democratic spirit anathema to the Roman ecclesiastical hierarchy. The Moravians were in all probability an authentic movement of the Holy Spirit in Bohemia. They moved to Saxony in 1722 and Nikolus Ludwig Graf von Zinzendorf (1700-1760) became their founding leader. Miss Klettenberg inspired “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul” in Book Six of Wilhelm Meister. It is revealing to read what Goethe says about her, for what it says about Goethe himself: In me she now found what she needed: a young, lively nature striving for some unknown salvation and, while not considering itself extraordinarily sinful, still in a far from comfortable condition and not quite healthy in either body or soul. She was delighted with my natural gifts as well as with

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While admitting a few lines later his notion of his relation with God was somewhat conceited and misconstrued, nevertheless the difference is plainly that between Miss Klettenberg’s fixed notion of God and fixed sense of reconciliation or justification with God, as a metaphysical entity, and Goethe’s open friendship with the Father. In this difference are two quite different ages of the Church. Positing Goethe as the first Father of the spiritual era of Christianity— as we are—must at least mean that the mystery of man begins to be revealed through Christ. In Book Fifteen of Poetry and Truth Goethe describes what sets him apart from the Moravian Brotherhood and other Christians, however hard he tried otherwise: Namely, what set me apart from the Brotherhood as well as from other worthy Christian souls was the very thing that has more than once brought schism to the church: Some would say that human nature has been so thoroughly corrupted by original sin that one can probe it to its depths without finding the slightest trace of goodness, and that therefore the human being must absolutely renounce his own powers and rely completely on the workings of grace. The others would be equally willing to concede man’s hereditary defects, but still wanted to grant nature its possession of a little inner cell (innerer Kern or inner core) which, when fertilised by divine grace, could grow into a joyous tree of spiritual bliss. Without realizing it myself, I was profoundly committed to the latter conviction, although I had confessed my faith in the opposing one with the tongue and pen. But I was only hazily aware of the real dilemma, and never put it into words. However, I was once quite unexpectedly brought down to earth when, in a religious conversation, I quite frankly expressed this opinion of mine, thinking it to be very innocent, and then had to suffer a long sermon of rebuke on account of it. In refutation it was claimed that this was true Pelagianism, and it was a particular misfortune for modern times to have this pernicious doctrine gaining ground again. I was astonished, nay, shocked at this.59

The passage goes on and in it, Goethe can see how he was not a Pelagian on one hand or a Moravian on the other. Yes “I could not be robbed of my affection for the Holy Scriptures or for Christianity’s founder and its early believers.” He then goes on to relate in some detail

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an unwritten poetic drama of the Wandering Jew that he wanted to write to express the conclusions he had come to on the vexed question of grace and free will. Basically, from this sketch, we can see man – personified by the Wandering Jew, Ahasuerus—is a sensible fellow. He meets Christ in passing. He cannot understand Christ’s higher destiny and how all human destiny is linked with it. And how we are in a state of exile, of essential homelessness until he comes again at the end of days. In this Goethe hardly distinguishes the Jewish and Christian beliefs. For the former it is the Messiah coming once; for the latter is the Messiah coming back. But it is the Messiah in any case and on the last day, the Bible promises, Jew and Christian will not differ on this matter. Goethe’s idea of the three reverences in the second part of Wilhelm Meister is given a context here. Our context is one of basic exile. We stand in need of God, waiting for him, and preparing for his advent. The Jew already knows he is doing this, and the Christian is basically in the same condition.

Goethe’s Spinoza From classic Protestant and Catholic positions, Goethe’s story raises lots of theological questions. Are we not sure of heaven then? Are we not sure of salvation? If these assurances are metaphysical, then yes, we are not sure. Goethe knows heaven is not a “place,” as in some metaphysical world view. The goodness God spoke over His world is the true dimension of this world, and Jesus Christ is the true dimension of man. This world needs to be won for God—to be transfigured into a place of glory and peace—and yet Goethe is no Pelagian; he realizes the conditions are treacherous. If people are not connected with that “little inner cell,” how can they be fertilized by divine grace? How can we participate in the Father’s kingdom? How can Christians be God’s body and do God’s will on earth? Yet our gifts are different and we prosper unequally as Goethe goes on to point out, some pages later in his concluding reflections: The common fate of human beings, which all of us have to bear, cannot but fall most heavily on the shoulders of him whose intellectual powers develop earliest and most broadly. We may prosper under the protection of parents and relatives, we may lean on brothers and sisters and friends, we may be amused by acquaintances and made happy by persons we love, but in the final analysis a human being is always thrust back on himself. Apparently even the Deity has positioned itself to man in such a way that it cannot always respond to his respect, trust and love, or at least not precisely at the urgent moment.60

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Rather than lapsing into agnosticism, disbelief, or stoicism or—as German philosophy was later to do—existentialism, Goethe states the solace, the comfort he finds in developing his talents, in being productive, and not in any workaday way. He speaks of his inspiration as Promethean, such is its divine spirit. Again, prior to all relation is our relation to God; then out of this and in tune with all the other relationships of a life, an ethos, a character is built. And if we are true to ourselves, it is a godlike character, or at the very least a godly one. Goethe defines himself Christologically in a way different from his age, but not in a way that would estrange him altogether from orthodoxy. This comes through in the controversy with Fritz Jacobi about Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). Jacobi had written a book attacking the great Dutch philosopher in 1785 and Goethe sprang to Spinoza’s defense. Goethe’s condemnation as a “pagan” or as a “Pelagian” are like Spinoza’s condemnation as an atheist or as a pantheist. These condemnations show no understanding of Goethe or of Spinoza. Again, a whole study is required on this topic and this is not the place for it. Spinoza was one who speaks of the God who comes to mind. Using the materialist and naturalistic language of Latin scholasticism and Cartesianism, Spinoza performed an intellectual feat beyond the scope of his age. In scholastic language he distinguished the unknowable Godhead (as the Bible does) from the energies of God that suffuse the world (as the Bible also does). This means we can both know and not know God. Instead Spinoza was interpreted by rationalists who read him in their image, and he was charged with atheism (because God is unknowable and nonexistent) and pantheism (because God is everywhere). These rationalizations about one of the world’s great theological philosophers come down to our day. Spinoza saw God as the Creator and man as a creator. His greatest work is the Ethics (first published, 1677), and this book is basically an interpretation of Revelation, because the God of the Bible is first and foremost an ethical God. Only through ethics which govern all relations, including that to the Father Himself, can we sensibly say we know God. Spinoza dissociated man from the scholastic category of natural substance (with the doctrine of two truths that is attendant on it), and instead attuned him to the energies of the divine.61 Goethe saw this, which is still not commonly seen about Spinoza, in my view, because of modern ressentiment against theology. Goethe writes about Spinoza in the context of his friendship with Jacobi: For I had assimilated the life and thought of this extraordinary man, indeed only incompletely and, as it were, furtively; but I had already felt some significant effects from that. The intellect that had affected me so markedly

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and was to have such a great influence on my whole way of thinking was Spinoza’s. For after I had searched everywhere in vain for a means of cultivating my strange personality, I finally happened upon this man’s Ethics. I could not possibly give an account of what I read out of this work, or into it. Let me just say, I found something in it to calm my emotions, and it seemed to open a broad free view over the physical and moral world. However, I was particularly captivated by the infinite selfishness that radiated from each of his propositions. That curious statement: “He who loves God rightly must not require God to love him in return,” with all the premises on which it rests and all the results issuing from it, pervaded my meditations. To be free of self-interest in everything, and especially in love and friendship, was my highest desire, my maxim, my practice; and that later impudent statement [of Philine in Wilhelm Meister]: “If I love you, what concern is that of yours?” came straight from my heart. Moreover, let us not fail to recognise here that the closest unions result between opposites. Spinoza’s all-soothing calmness contrasted with my all-agitating aspirations, while his mathematical method was the reverse of my poetic thinking and composing; and what made me his passionate disciple and most confirmed admirer was precisely that orderly procedure which people felt was inappropriate for moral subject matter. Mind and heart, reason and sense, sought each other out in irresistible elective affinity, and by this means a unification of our very disparate natures was accomplished.62

What captivates Goethe right from the start is the reverence in Spinoza. Other readers see the formalism, and the Cartesian commitment to methodology—not what the axioms and corollaries, the methodology, actually point at. They point at a sense of the abundance God has for mankind and the sophianic principle that we are bound to—a spirit or energy of wisdom that is truly God’s, truly man’s, and the possibility of their synergy or cooperation. Goethe does not just see the finger, but he sees where it points: to life! And to wisdom, which is of God! Again the wisdom is God’s, not man’s. In hindsight Goethe is stunned that after feeling joined “by way of the innermost self” to Jacobi and being so close intellectually, they subsequently cut very different paths. Our destiny is precisely our aloneness, the aloneness that separates what we have heard Goethe speak of so eloquently, above. And yet at the same time it is the aloneness that divinizes, that releases the power of “that little inner cell,” that spark of the divine that animates the soul from within. Here is just one sample passage (but an important one) of Spinoza with which Goethe would have absolutely shaken hands on. It relates to what we have heard Goethe relate above in Wilhelm Meister about reverence. It is the Scholium on Proposition 54. The Proposition on which Spinoza comments reads: Repentance is not a virtue, i.e,. it does not arise from reason; he who repents of his action is doubly unhappy or weak. If

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we imagine Goethe subscribing to this view, it puts paid to charges of Pelagianism, while showing that he does not take the supernaturalistic stand of classic Protestantism, either. As people seldom live according to the dictates of reason, these two emotions, humility and repentance, and also hope and fear, bring more advantage than harm; and thus, if sin we must, it is better to sin in their direction. For if people of weak spirit should all equally be subject to pride, and should be ashamed of nothing and afraid of nothing, by what bonds could they be held together and bound? The mob is fearsome, if it does not fear. So it is not surprising that the prophets, who had regard for the good of the whole community, and not of the few, have been so zealous in commending humility, repentance, and reverence. And in fact those who are subject to these emotions can be far more readily induced than others to live by the guidance of reason in the end, that is, to become free people and enjoy the life of the blessed.63

Live dangerously, said Nietzsche, and he meant: Live from the truth of who God says we are, not who the world says we are, not who our country says we are, not what any context or circumstance says we are. All these matter, all these have their impact on us, but we do not derive our identity from these sources, but from a prior source, in God. Spinoza was an actual personification of Nietzschean living-dangerously, and so was Goethe. Knowing this, that we have to live in terms of who God says we are, and what He has for us, not the world, it followed that Goethe prayed into his destiny. He was aligning his soul with the source of his identity, in God. His education had a beginning and it had an end. The end was the work done, the ability to say, “It is finished,” and to die at what Nietzsche, in Zarathustra, called “the right time.” Goethe lived dangerously because he was forced, by who he was, to live between one metaphysical version of Christianity and another, between one ideological political view and another, between the demands of love and nature, love and convention, society and self, culture and thought, poetry and truth, one war and another. None of them defines him. Goethe’s thought, his art, his person are manifestly beyond interpretation in the sense of some settled view or picture that captures him. This fact is especially Goethean. Yet at the same time we can provide quotations, as we have, which capture him perfectly. According to Rosenzweig: No-one can imitate him in this [living dangerously] except at risk of his own neck. Goethe’s life is truly a hike along the precipice between two abysses; he managed never for a moment of his life to lose the ground of the well-founded, enduring earth from under his feet. Everyone else, unless

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caught by the arms of divine love and granted flight into eternity, would of necessity have to tumble into one of the two abysses which yawn on each side of that ridge which everyone must nonetheless ascend sooner or later for the sake of the vitality of life. The piety of prayer to the personal fate borders directly on [that of] the prayer of the sinner, who presumes himself free to entreat everything, and of the fanatic, who thinks that, for the sake of the distant One which the moment of the prayer indicates as essential to him, everything other than this One, everything nearest, must be forbidden to him. Goethe slipped into neither of these two abysses. He made it–“let someone match it if he can!” A votive tablet is erected on the precipice. It illustrates, through the example of [in Nietzsche] Zarathustra’s decline and fall, how one can become a sinner and a fanatic in one person, an immoralist who smashes all the old tablets, and a tyrant who overpowers his neighbour as well as himself for the sake of the next-but-one, his friend for the sake of the new friends. The tablet furthermore warns every traveller who has ascended the ridge not to try to retrace Goethe’s steps on Goethe’s path, like him alone hopefully trusting the tread of his own feet, without the wings of faith or love, a pure son of this earth.64

Striving There are a couple of additional points to make about Goethe as the first Father of the Johannine Church, which imbue his life and work, and resonate with Pentecostalism. The first has to do with striving. All Christians should strive. We strive for transformation of ourselves and of our world with our church. But there are two kinds of striving: a selfseeking, self-absorbed, self-realizing striving (such are asceticism and Church politics), a road to hell paved with good intentions. And then there is a striving with is tied to sacrifice, which finds itself by losing itself, and does this in and through its work (the saintliness such we see in Teresa of Avila or Francis of Assisi, Thomas, or Dominic). Sometimes these two kinds of striving are hard to tell apart. Goethe was a great figure of striving in his life, and in his work it is a strong theme. This has been studied in many languages already, but it would be worth a new study from a Pentecostal perspective. For striving is intrinsic to Pentecostal culture. It is a culture that is always striving, stretching itself, stepping out and stepping beyond itself in faith. Never before has the Church striven with such urgency and in a way that is so central to itself. Goethe’s Faust is a great book of striving. We cannot go into the subject of the influence of Goethe’s Faust, or of the drama of Faust (it is undidactic in any case), or the relation of Goethe to his creations, and Faust in particular. Investigation of these questions, however, would certainly yield a rich source for further understanding of the first Father,

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without regard to the matter of striving. Walter Kaufmann distinguishes two types: Goethe saw the dangers of Faustian striving and attempted in a great variety of ways to dissociate himself from Faust…he came to distinguish two kinds of striving: the romantic, unconditional, and hence destructive kind Faust represents, and his own classical, self-disciplined devotion to work. These two kinds of striving correspond to, and probably helped to inspire, Hegel’s contrast between “good” and “bad” infinite; and Hegel used his influence as a professor of philosophy in Berlin to remind his students: “Whoever wants something great, says Goethe, must be able to limit himself.”65

Certainly Hegel set himself fairly broad limits even by Goethean standards. Kaufmann goes on to explain how Hegel’s massive Philosophy of Right was Goethean and how Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, all world philosophers, “could all have said to Goethe what Hegel wrote to him on April 24th 1825: ‘When I survey the course of my spiritual development, I see you everywhere woven into it and would like to call myself one of your sons; my inward nature has… set its course by your creations as by signal fires.’”66 To understand Goethe further as the first Father, and indeed the third age of the Church in its philosophical foundations, we could trace the lineaments of his presence in the century in which global philosophy was truly born.

Hope Hope is the sign over the Johannine Church, as faith was over the Pauline Church and Marian love over the Petrine Church. Each of these churches accords with paganism, with the world, in some way. But unlike Goethe and Pentecostal Christianity (as a whole), the traditional Churches both uphold strong metaphysics. Pentecostalism has a weak metaphysics, a secularist stand corresponding to Goethe’s half humorous claim to be both pagan and Christian. We’ve seen this was not a matter of compromise— which presupposes the metaphysical bastion, but of spiritual growth and maturity. Rosenzweig writes about hope as a sign: For him who trusts and hopes there is no offering that would be a giving up of something; it is entirely natural for him to offer up sacrifices, he knows no other way. Love was very feminine, faith very masculine; only hope is always childlike; only in it does the “Become like children” begin to be realised in Christianity. And therefore Goethe is “always childlike”. He trusts in his destiny. He hopes for his own future. He cannot imagine that

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“the gods” would not let him finish the work of his hands. He hopes, as Augustine loves, as Luther believes. And so the whole world comes under this new sign. Hope becomes now the greatest. The old powers are reconciled in hope; faith and love adapt themselves. From the children’s sense of hope now they get new power, such that they become young again like the eagle. It is like a new world morning, like a beginning anew from the beginning, thus as if there had been nothing before. Faith that proves true in love, the love that carries faith within its bosom, they are both now carried on high on the wings of hope. For thousands and thousands of years, faith has been hoping to have been true in love, love to have carried true faith into the one and universal light of the world. Man says: I hope to believe.67

A Pentecostal Christian will recognize himself or herself in these words. There is a contrast—ecclesially reflected—between the chauvinism of faith and the pacifism of hope. A Pentecostal church will not let churchiness come between it and the Kingdom of God, or the world (where the Church must reach). It is a deliberately worldly hopefulness, rather than the hope of otherworldly utopia. Pentecostalism starts as if nothing had gone before. Its start is pure and innocent. That is why it resonates with the Book of Acts. Through Acts all the other New and Old Testament writings are illuminated. This is in contrast to Luther’s selective reading of Romans, which side-lined and obscured other New and Old Testament writings such as the letters of John and James, and the Wisdom literature. But Pentecostalism’s readings of Acts brings the Bible into unity and unity into Church and relates Church and world, pagan and Christian. Late in life Goethe wrote a philosophical poem summing up his stance beyond any totalizing interpretation, any metaphysical reduction. The poem is called Urworte. Orphisch. Goethe’s Urworte are Destiny (Daimon), Chance (Tyche), Love (Eros), Necessity (Ananke) and finally, Hope (Elpis). These Urworte form a five-fold panel, like an altarpiece. Urworte are primordial utterances in two senses. First, the seer or poet, inspired by the divine afflatus, stammers out words that comprise a sum of human experience—words with an extremely wide semantic range, single words that encapsulate expressions that would otherwise need dozens of words.68 Second, from a religious point of view the Urworte are words that symbolize creation from nothing; for example, “Let there be light” (fiat lux). Goethe used the word Orphic because of the association with the Orphic mysteries, not in any romantic sense, nor in any historical sense. The association was poetic. The poetics of this association are twofold. First, revelation. The seer speaks and reveals the inner connection among

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existents. Second, creation. As God’s Word is creation, so Ur (primordial) points to the beginning and Worte (words as deeds) to their actualization. Goethe’s philosophy, if there is one, is not professorial philosophy, but drawn from feelings that seem to be analogous to what the ancient Greeks considered as the seer’s en-theos-iamos, the God speaking through the poet’s visions. In the Urworte. Orphisch, Goethe gave expression to this total connectedness and disparity between God-world-man and the three reverences, as well as his having been inserted into the temporal segment of the infinite stream of eternity. His last and most beautiful panel is reserved for Hope: Let these impediments, these walls of iron [of Ananke] Stand in their wonted rocklike endurance: But the repulsive gate shall be unlocked! One being [hope] moves, light and untrammelled, through curtains of clouds, rain and fog, Lifting us up, giving us wings: You know her well, she swarms through all zones, And one beat of her wings leaves behind us eons.69

This poem captures the spiritual nature of hope. We are caught in the traps of necessity, chance, destiny, and eros, but there is a way out. We are free if we have hope. Hope lifts us. This is exactly what the Gospel is supposed to do, and what the Church is supposed to do for the poor: lift them up, raise mankind. The whole Kingdom of God is a raising-up, a transfiguration and glorification of humanity and the world. That is the Christian hope. In love—as Goethe’s poem suggests, we can be lost—but joined to hope that comes from the promises of the Father, God, it has a purpose and a power. Even so, somehow our lives and destinies are worked out between the dissonance and contradictions as well as the convergences of these deep words of life—and of course there are other Urworte that might be added to the list. No wonder life is complicated, and no theology or philosophy can work like a recipe. Nothing about Goethe or his work invites one to think in a simplistic way about God, world, and man, and I think this goes a long way to explain Goethe’s advocacy of education and cultural production—both in arts and sciences.

Connections with Pentecostalism and Extrapolations The idea of Goethe as the first Father of Pentecostalism is not a mechanistic or causological connection with Pentecostalism. Goethe reverberates and resonates with Pentecostalism from a sense of the third

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era of Christianity, which is centered on the spirit. Goethe’s connection with Pentecostalism is not metaphysical, but experiential, developmental, and personal (in a word, hermeneutical). Yes there was the Goethe of the Roman Elegies (1795) and the Venetian Epigrams (1796). So in other words there is a supplement. Goethe is not totalized by Pentecostalism any more than Jesus is by Christianity or Paul is by Protestant faith alone. Goethe and Pentecostalism are not closed upon one another; they stand in open interpretative relationship. Goethe represents a new outworking of Christianity in a third age in which we have, in Gianni Vattimo’s words, “secularity as the authentic destiny of Christianity.”70 Pentecostalism, for all its theological roots in the holiness movement, and for all its theological vagaries and reactions, is the Christianity of a secular world. And for those in a part of the world that is not secularized (and in a world that is fully mapped, where would that really be?), Pentecostalism will pull new believers out of their old beliefs, in the name of Jesus, and dispel all the old gods, witches, and demons. Christ will break the chains. The person set free, though, will be a more secular person, rather than, as one might expect, a more somehow religious person.71 Philosophically Goethe is the first Father of Pentecostalism because of his admirable secularity. Just as the monk and the prelate incarnated the Petrine age of the Church and the bourgeois and democrat incarnated the second Pauline age of the Church, so the secular free agent with a special destiny incarnates the Johannine third age of the Church. Of course, these ages do not replace one another; they are typological, not chronological. They are also philosophical and as such, are defining for theology, since theology is never any more inherently meaningful than the philosophy which in-forms it. Philosophy, which lost importance in the Pauline age of the Church, and for a large part was replaced by doctrinal theology as the Church’s premiere discourse, has returned through the secular world. The repressed has returned. And now philosophy is no longer simply the work of philosophers, but the work of theologians as well,72 and the work of writers and artists who can show what is creative, revelatory and redemptive through their work, as their “speech.” This is no longer the old philosophy of objectivist reasoning, but the philosophy of redemptive speech-thinking. Rosenzweig calls it “the new thinking.”73 In the same spirit, Theodor Adorno says, “There is no light of knowledge except that thrown on the world by redemption.”74 But the point is, the pluralism of secularity today no longer holds itself aloof and apart from such redemptive reasoning, but realizes that it needs it.

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The outworking of our Christianity, which is our relation with Christ in the Spirit, and the prayer to God for our destiny is not reducible to narrow hypocritical prudery and moralism. In an age of interpretation it must become hermeneutical. This is not to condone license (the Protestant anxiety asserts); but Pentecostals pray for bolder biblical destinies as a people of the word. Goethe, as the first Father of Pentecostalism, strengthens Pentecostal self-understanding. Pentecostals will speak of standing in the Bible and standing on the Bible for living. Even so, Pentecostals bring a pre-understanding to the Bible; this pre-understanding is not Protestant. Protestants differ by having a doctrine of the Bible that they tend to bring to their Bible-reading, and which their reading reinforces. Protestants are often critical or simply uncomprehending (and incredulous) about what seems to them the “loose” way Pentecostals approach the Bible, taking from here, taking from there, with seemingly no doctrine of approach or exegetical rules to follow. But that is precisely the strength of Pentecostal biblicism, and its difference from the Pauline era. It is Goethean; that means it shows creativity and autonomy. Also, with regard to Pentecostal pre-understanding of the Bible, it is Goethean because it has to do with the three reverences. Pentecostals bring to the Bible a sense of these reverences and a sense that doesn’t oppose the secular to the Christian, as Goethe didn’t oppose the pagan and the Christian in him, but re-creates them in secularity, which is new to the world of his time and now overtaking the world of ours. Secular Christians bring a pre-understanding to Bible reading and to a church that is able to laugh, make jokes, and be irreverent, and not prudish and moralistic. This approach, arising from secular pre-understanding, which wants to keep it real or not keep it at all, is normal in our time, not reactionary. Another way to see Goethe as the first Father of Pentecostalism is through creativity. Our destiny is about having our relation with God unlock our creativity. As it was for Goethe. This will be different for each of us. In the last 100 years, probably Nikolai Berdyaev, the great Russian speech-thinker, has been the most empowering writer on Christian creativity.75 Broadly, we can list the obvious points that make Goethe a first Father of the spiritual era of Christianity. First, there is in him the sense of personal uniqueness and destiny that God has for each of us. Second, in him is the man of culture, and the man for culture. Pentecostalism is not historically associated with culture, yet; even so, it is about going into all the world, not to make the world into the dream of a Holy Roman Empire (the Petrine era), or to colonize it in a common belief system (Pauline era), but to let the spirit loose in it and let the spirit have its way. While the

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Petrine Church imperialized Christianity, the Pauline Church splintered it into slivers; but the Johannine Church will diversify Christianity, without bringing disunity to it, because the diversity will be unified in the one name of Jesus.76 Third, there is the unsystematizable side of Goethe’s interests and involvements. This has to do with the natural tendency to diversification I have just spoken of and which is characteristic of the Spirit. Goethe neither is driven by an agenda (except for a sense of fulfilling his capabilities and potentiality), nor is he politically driven (even while he was in politics). Nor is Goethe subservient to higher spiritual authority (or what one would like to think it is). Goethe is neither a Catholic (subservient to higher authority) nor is he Protestant (ideologically based in some confession of faith). That is why Goethe thought, from time to time, he wasn’t a Christian at all. It isn’t that he wasn’t a Christian, he just wasn’t a Christian in any known sense at the time. Looking back now, however, we can see it differently. Goethe reverenced God, he reverenced others and himself, and he reverenced the world he lived in with its culture and all its differences. He was the first Father of a Christianity to come, and of churches to come that would be absolutely distinctive in their own ways. Fourth, he was a man of striving, and striving is a theme of his work. The kingdom of God, of peace, must strive against “principalities and powers” and always be on the move forward. At the heart of this is generosity. Goethe was a giver, not a taker. He was a man of inner freedom, not (what Nietzsche called) ressentiment. There could be another whole chapter on ressentiment, on the embeddedness of modernity in a culture of ressentiment.77 Nietzsche began the critique, and it was completed by the phenomenologist Max Scheler, who at the same time corrected Nietzsche’s misunderstanding of the relation of Christianity to ressentiment. But Goethe lived abundantly and generously beyond all this and no circumstance in which he was caught proved larger than his destined movement and fulfillment. And finally, Goethe exemplifies a wisdom that is hopeful. Much wisdom is Saturnine, dark and retrospective; but Goethe’s wisdom was imbued with hope and this made it unique and Christian (but in a new way). His wisdom was proleptic, it saw forward, and led to education in the sense of people (his characters) finding growth and maturity. Matthew del Nevo is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Catholic Institute of Sydney, Australia.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY’S ANTI-TRANSCENDENT CRITIQUE OF KARL BARTH WAYNE CRISTAUDO

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O MATTER HOW ONE TRAVERSES twentieth-century Christian theology, one name that is impossible to bypass is Karl Barth. Such is his significance that one might even be tempted to divide twentiethcentury theology into two streams: Barthian and anti-Barthian. If one accepted such a division, there is no doubt that Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy belonged in the anti-Barthian camp. That itself, however, would not mean that Rosenstock-Huessy would find many members in that camp with whom he could make common cause. Barth is not the only theologian Rosenstock-Huessy engages with. He has sharp words for Bultmann, is critical of Brunner, somewhat mixed on Tillich (highly supportive of the kairos, but wary of Tillich’s “Greek” tendencies), and is consistently appreciative of Hans Urs von Balthasar. But I think it is his critique of Barth that best enables us to throw into sharp relief Rosenstock-Huessy’s radically anti-transcendent, post-Nietzschean, form of Christianity. In late October 1919 Karl Barth informed Eduard Thurneysen that he had read “Der Selbstmord Europas (the suicide of Europe), which Rosenstock-Huessy had sent him and he had enjoyed it like a “hearty lunch.”1 The next day Rosenstock-Huessy wrote to Barth saying that he had just read the Preface of Barth’s Letter to the Romans and that he was eagerly looking forward to reading the whole thing. Throughout the rest of 1919 and 1920 Rosenstock-Huessy wrote to him on several occasions. But if he had hoped to find in Barth a new dialogue partner within the Christian faith, someone who would push him into new directions in the way that Rosenzweig had done, he came to realize that he was deeply mistaken. Already in what seems to be his next letter, dated November 18,

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1919, Rosenstock-Huessy addresses points that will be central to his disagreement with Barth.2 Barth had picked up on Rosenstock-Huessy’s anti-transcendence and questioned whether he saw the unity of Geist (spirit / mind) and soul, people, and state as a supra-terrestrial one and, referring to 1 Corinthians 15, asked Rosenstock-Huessy whether the “transcendent” powers belonging to God are meant for humanity. Rosenstock-Huessy’s reply indicates that he now saw with great clarity what divided him and Barth. Informing Barth that the word transcendence makes him nervous because it smacks of pagan philosophy, he throws at Barth the following questions: Hasn’t salvation come into the world? Hasn’t God taken pity on us? Does Paul speak of the transcendent powers of a new eon, or of a Father who lives up there 50 million kilometers away? Or does he speak of the Son of God who became man? Christ became flesh; thus we live in his name, which is the addressable and effable name of God. Thus has God revealed himself. Where’s the transcendence in this?3

Rosenstock-Huessy’s letters to Barth are no less packed with provocations and ideas than his letters to Rosenzweig, but Barth was not only not budging, but uneasy about ever having opened himself to this “dialogue.” Rosenstock-Huessy, however, kept writing letters to him which were as lengthy and detailed in their criticisms as they were unwelcome. Barth had come to regret that he had asked RosenstockHuessy to review his Letter to the Romans and he and his friend Eduard Thurneysen were in agreement that now Rosenstock-Huessy was a real nuisance.4 He had also come to realize that the whole Patmos circle— Rosenstock-Huessy, Leo Weismantel, Werner Picht, Hans Ehrenberg, Viktor von Weizsäcker, (and at one time, Karl Barth)—stood for something very different from him. On March 22, 1920, he informs Thurneysen that he detects certain similarities between the Patmos group and the Sybil cults of the Greeks, and that he hopes they succeed in shutting up Rosenstock-Huessy, urging Thurneysen to do his best. Given the ferocity of Rosenstock-Huessy’s attacks on Barth, even an admirer of Rosenstock-Huessy might have sympathy for Barth. The brutality of Rosenstock-Huessy’s critique is evident enough in a letter dated February 18, 1920, to an unknown recipient, in which Rosenstock-Huessy tells his correspondent how crazy Barth’s book is making him feel. Barth, he says, has written his book, as if “humanity” itself had written it. The book, he says, is written by a “purely intellectual (I) ‘book of experience’ (Erlebnisbuch)”adding, with contempt, “for him the questions of theology are themselves experience.”5 “His book is art

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pour l’art in pure culture.” His Christ is “merely a buzz word.” “Sins, death, especially Easter and resurrection—he asserts them constantly, but he only asserts them. And just what is asserted, is just as easily disputed. I dispute the lot. The more I read Barth, the more mythical his Christ becomes to me, which is to say the more doubtful.”6 At the core of Rosenstock-Huessy, dissatisfaction with Barthian theology, then, is that Barth focuses on the uniqueness of the event, and God’s absolute alterity. On the latter point, Barth displays a resort to precisely the kind of pre-Nietzschean metaphysics that Rosenzweig’s the Star of Redemption had demolished. For Rosenstock-Huessy, revelation is of necessity a process involving time. Thus time is never simply a condition of experience, but an intrinsic part of any experience. And thus, whereas Barth focuses on Christ as becoming manifest in a time and place, which illustrates God’s perfection and love as expressed in an absolute moment, Rosenstock-Huessy sees any such talk as smelling of frozen time and its accompanying view of eternity as but a fantasy, nothing but an idealistic residue. Thus Barth’s theology is said by Rosenstock-Huessy to be theology “commented upon, or more precisely demented, through Kantianism.”7 The same point is made some years later in his essay “Ichthyos: Life, Teaching and Influence” included in Das Alter der Kirche, where he says “all is revealed to him (that is, Barth) at one moment of world history, in the split-second of crucifixion. The early history of Jesus (that is, his life) and the later history of Christ (that is, Church history) become worthless junk. He imagines himself addressed vertically from heaven, alone beneath the cross, without natural prehistory.”8 The real issue between them is: What is being promised? RosenstockHuessy remains, like Franz Rosenzweig, absolutely connected to the promise of the redemption of the world. That takes time. The truth of Christ, thus for Rosenstock-Huessy, becomes simply a moral example in the writings of men like Barth—and it must be said that this is not always a bad thing, as in Barth’s eventual refusal to compromise with Hitler. But is this not to say that while Christianity is not just a moral code, there are some things required of a Christian, and not to do them is simply not to follow in Christ in any way at all? Rosenstock-Huessy could accept that the Jewish Rosenzweig could place eternity against time, because the Jewish people were remnants who, as a people, were bound by blood, but were without nation and language.9 Hence, they lived out of historical time, and as remnants, they close in upon themselves to be with Abraham and the Messiah. Rosenstock, a Christian, has to be alert to the resurrection of Christ’s body in time—not

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as a myth, as Overbeck and Bultmann had misunderstood, nor as an (Hegelian) idea, and far less as a fantasy, but as the reality of the Church in history. Only thus for Rosenstock-Huessy does the flesh become word, and the Second Coming becomes not just a promise but a reality to come. In contrast to an historical en-fleshing of the redeemed Christ is the inherent dualism in Barth’s theology, betraying a stamp of mind of the sort Rosenzweig had identified in the Star as philosophy’s attempt to escape death—or a variant, to escape moral impurity. What needs to be seen for Rosenstock-Huessy if Christianity is to be the way and the truth is that it is world-forming, that God is doing his work in the world. That also means that the reality of our responsiveness (the ontological follow-on of Rosenstock’s dialogicism as opposed to Barth’s non-dialogicism) is part of Christ’s resurrection and our redemption. And yet again these are timetaking processes. And for Rosenstock-Huessy, Barth has no idea of the time that was needed for Christ’s power of attraction to work its way into the world: “It took a complete millennium, the first one, so that he could attract monks and martyrs. And then it took another one so that he could appeal to the rest of us, ever-new parts of the world had to be supplied and won by Christ through the power of love, the power of resolution (all which remains stuck in Barth’s dead Christianity).”10 Barth, he says, fails to grasp that “we only come to eternity through time. First we have to emphasize that we are time-men and time-comrades. Only through that are our thoughts refined to supra-temporality.”11 Barth, he says, doesn’t really understand that “the secret of Abraham can only be brought out after Christ has lived—and only a man of a new bond may formulate what the old cancels out.”12 This stands in the closest association to Rosenstock’s sociological orientation based as it is on the idea that it is the salvation of all that alone forms the completed body of the risen Christ. Thus in his lectures at Munich after World War II, he would say, citing Gregory of Nyssa: “Humanity should become God. But that cannot happen without all other human beings becoming God.”13 For Rosenstock-Huessy, God is pouring himself into his creation so that his creatures can be fully divinized. Christianity then is not a narrative about isolated acts of goodness and isolated souls performing acts of love, but about how love redeems the world by forming new rafts of souls to transport generations out and across the catastrophes that threaten to extinguish us. It is also about how it contributes to dead things being awoken, and hence about the salvation of all. This is why it is providential and not egoistic or individualistic. It was also why Rosenstock-Huessy had little time for Kierkegaard: “that grim

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and grisly monster without confession and so without Church,” as he described him harshly in one letter to Rosenzweig.14 In fact, for him, the Greek faith in immortality is simply a piece of childishness he believes was tolerated by the Church because it did no real harm to its mission when Christendom was united by a common commitment to making the world on the basis of sacrificial love.15 But he believed that one of the consequences of the many triumphs of the humanist and rationalist understandings of life over that of the Church was the widely held belief that Christianity had been a religion devoted to transcendence. Further, it had been built upon such dualisms as body and soul, which were Greek inventions created, as Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy both held, out of the fear of death. That Rosenstock-Huessy’s understanding of Christianity would find itself challenged is hardly surprising. Thus, for example, Karl Löwith in his 1946 review of The Christian Future for the journal, Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture says that Rosenstock-Huessy’s ideas are essentially closer to paganism (especially Goethe) and that he secularizes and vaporizes Christianity.16 For his part, Rosenstock-Huessy sees the kind of criticism being made by Löwith as due to a complete inability to understand the connection between the Christian, the pagan, and the Jew, and the widespread tendency, repeated by Löwith, to project Greek philosophical abstractions—soul, immortality, timelessness, the good, etc.—onto Christianity. For Rosenstock-Huessy the Greek god of Barth then is just a phantasm, having little to do with the flux of life we experience and the suffering that makes us call out God’s name. God is not a transcendent other for Rosenstock-Huessy, but an ever-active and ever-moving spirit trying to bring more love into the world. It is why Rosenstock-Huessy’s work makes constant reference to the Holy Spirit, and why his Sociology and Universal History are but an observation of where the Holy Spirit has appeared and required us to die to old forms and enter into new ones. This process is necessary for freeing ourselves of old spaces and connecting ourselves in a more integral way so that the power of God’s love might be more powerfully expressed in and between us. Barth’s god, on the other hand, for Rosenstock-Huessy is, in spite of Barth’s triune emphasis, nothing but an abstract god. Barth finds absolute certainty in God, but that is because his god is the stable god of idealism. There is much to be envied about such certainties and righteousness among those who have them. But for Rosenstock-Huessy, they have little to do with what is required by us in life. In “Pentecost and Mission,” where he contrasts Barth with the

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Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, Barth’s respondent and critic, he writes:17 The Spirit is manifold, while Reason is only a one-way street. The term mittere strives against the confusion between the mere mind, which is the atrophied enslavement of the Spirit by our little selves, and the “message,” the missionary power of the Spirit over us. Our mind, indeed, is not “sent,” is not “on the way” of truth or life. The mind sits in judgment and argument, in rationalization and apologetics. But the Spirit ranges far and wide, gathering together and uniting scattered groups, while armchair philosophers, mere spectators of this stream of social formations, rub their eyes in astonishment. Communion may be realized, first of all, if every man ad-mit that he has been separated, by his work and his worldly responsibilities, from the intimate union of the whole Body. The importance of “ad-mission” is obscured today by the weakened meaning of the term “sin.” The sin of which every service of worship should free us, in the light of Pentecost, is not the weakness of moral perfection or of imperfection. It is rather the spiritual obtuseness which, incidentally, is preponderant in perfect, righteous, and responsible people. It is of no interest in the Kingdom of Heaven that a thief or a drunkard admits that he is a thief or a drunkard; this is of more interest to the police. Much more than this is needed to convene the Body of Christ.18

Ultimately the difference being identified here is also one between the sociological emphasis and the philosophical / theological one. In the former, the relationships themselves are generative, not simply the isolated actor, because God enters into relationships, and we are the expression of His spirit and the creature who is supposed to fulfill creation. Pertinent here are Rosenstock-Huessy’s comments on the Holy Spirit, a part of which has been cited in an earlier chapter, from his contribution to Rosenzweig’s fortieth birthday tribute. Thus, it should be self-evident that the Holy Spirit is the spirit of man in finality. Wherever mankind is coined definitively, there is God. He is in each sacrifice, in every conversion, in every selfless devotion, which helps the loved child of man to reach perfection. In contrast, where the coined form is absent and life goes on, as in the course of everyday work or in daily family life, there man’s spirit is not holy. Here “the” man is not present, but only one or more children of man, who can still be illuminated by the holy spirit, but may not be inspired even if he thinks good and holy thoughts. Holy thoughts are never Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit is only in divestment. In the true sense of faith, it is essential for the holy spirit that it include entrance into the dangerous world of the children of men in order to

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transform children into men, in order to address the children of Israel and to make them rise above what is innate. Otherwise, it does not serve any purpose to talk about the Holy Spirit. Because then, we would not be at the day of God’s history in man, at the primeval, very first day of the creation of man.19

This distinction between the morally good person and the servant of the Holy Spirit is an extremely important one in Rosenstock-Huessy, and it is indicative of a choice between seeing the world in which vitality and love, and hence the furtherance of the creation itself, are seen as the purpose of life, or whether life is seeking a final resolution, a kind of purified calmness, or rest. This latter choice, though, for RosenstockHuessy is nothing but death itself, and that is why talk about moral goodness really misses the point. We will constantly do wrong, but that is not the issue. For we are simply not in control of the world we make. If we were, then Plato and all the moral philosophers would be correct, and there would be no need to invoke the living God or repent for our sins. We could apply the moral rule or cultivate our mind and talents, and that would bring about the world we want. Both these approaches to life—the Kantian and Platonic / Aristotelian—are so seductive and so widely held among well-educated people that their truth seems too transparent to question. Yet the one simple fact that is an intrinsic part of RosenstockHuessy’s thinking, and which also separates him from the overwhelming majority of theologians and philosophers, is the constant gap between intention and reality. It is no accident that the first full-blown moral philosophy, that of Plato’s, pays such attention to artisans and their technique, for there we do frequently and even mostly see continual fits between intention and reality. That is because the very restricted reality that an artisan is dealing with. To be sure, modern science shows us how much depth can be mined within the constricted spaces carved out by intentionality. But the lifeworld is not like the workbench or the laboratory. Plato’s point thus makes sense for a whole range of acts, but not if they involve assuming unintended consequences. A talented artisan can be assumed to make a good instrument, but what fate that instrument will have is a mystery. Kant knew this and that’s why he could think only of salvaging morality as an act of will absolutely severed from any real-world result. This move on Kant’s part certainly strengthened his concept of the moral will, by saving it from the problems confronting Plato. But it left humanity in the lurch of a rather arid sense of dignity. His third Critique acknowledged as much. It sought to find a fit between our intentions and our world. And while it raised the bar of aesthetics, made insightful points about the capacity of

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the mind to posit ends in nature to counter a completely mechanistic view of life, and made freedom in history a regulative ideal, it still remained part of a philosophical packaging of life that life refuses to conform to. This is why Nietzsche could refute Kant on the basis of almost no real study of his writings. The emphasis about the lack of fit between what we think we are doing when we act and what we actually do might sound like a rather obvious or trivial point. But it is not. Indeed, the neglect of the “lack of fit” between willing and action is one that seems so obvious that it rarely bothers philosophers. By putting the matter thus, the last thing I am interested in is moving toward that analytic philosophical approach that wants to solve a cognitive puzzle or set up a thought experiment. The point is much better appreciated generally by economists than philosophers. This is, in no small part, why they are far more reluctant generally than moral philosophers to come up with simple moral solutions—say, ones involving straightforward, redistributive solutions to deal with social inequalities. This is not because they like inequality and love the wealthy, but because they are ever reminded that the gap between intention and result is very real and that each new action sets off a multiplicity of other actions that might never have been intended. Now Rosenstock-Huessy’s web of problems does not easily become disentangled if we focus on the kind of horizon that concerned Friedrich von Hayek or Karl Popper, or even Michael Oakeshott.20 And he was not an economist. But the point I wish to make is that his approach to social life is one that, at a sociological level, is far closer to the economist’s spirit than to the philosopher’s because the emphasis is on living processes. Philosophers tend to halt the flow of events, to assess and analyze the intention of the participants to measure its moral worth, much as a judge does. But the courtroom is a very imperfect model for seeking to understand human growth and the spirit, because Rosenstock-Huessy is to be found in the swirl of life. Hence for Rosenstock-Huessy, far more important than spending our energies weighing up the moral niceties of this or that action or intention is realizing that we build all the time on what we have done. There are no stable centers of luminosity, and God is certainly not the sphere of philosophical reason. Thus in the letter of February 18, 1920, he writes that Barth makes the mistake of seeing the devil only as fluid, and he has God as stable, but “God, though, is just as uncertain as the devil! … Out of hatred against experiences, Barth forgets that God, while He calls us, becomes as fluid as all the other drives of our soul.”21 For Rosenstock-Huessy, God’s command and our own obduracy are on a collision course, for it is what we become in our dissolution that

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enables God’s purposes to be fulfilled. Dying to ourselves is precisely what Rosenstock-Huessy sees as the necessary condition of what Rosenzweig called the “world becoming fully alive.” Thus then we are ever building upon or working with materials that are not good or perfect in themselves. Sins are not destroyed, rather they begin to live in so far as they receive sense. The forgiveness of sins means then to make sins into something fruitful. Why sins, sins for his brothers. Jesus’ sins again against the law— which he took upon himself for us—receive sense in relationship to the law.”22

Again the Goethean strand of Rosenstock-Huessy’s point is evident. That we as a species are changed primarily through love and its catastrophic, idolatrous mis-directions and things lacking is the social reality that we are ever faced with. The moralist makes a gesture of defiance and transcendence, but reality is the opportunity not to undo the past but to transform ourselves through ingesting and transmuting its energies and lessons. In this sense Rosenstock-Huessy’s sympathies lie with the revolutionaries throughout the ages (“To the Revolutionaries,” reads the title of Section II of the Prologue in Out of Revolution), revolutionaries who are forced to act under circumstances where the cool mind is as rare as it is of little use.23 Rosenstock-Huessy is both a social scientist and a human being, and he was suspicious of anyone who thought the former name took care of the latter. It didn’t, but as a social scientist he saw that his task was to make sense of how reality contributes to our salvation and not simply to express our condemnation of our failures. Moralizing is so easy. Hence he writes in Der Atem des Geistes: All moralizing history prides itself on holding that we should be able to learn off by heart, the small and great basics of life like the catechism. If only we did that, then we would not make any mistakes, and all would think and say the same thing.”24

And in Out of Revolution he writes: The moralist and the creator live in different tenses. This is usually overlooked; yet if we mix the ethical with the political aspect of life we shall never be able to do justice to our own best actions. Every soul that faces reality is perfectly aware of this distinction and acts accordingly with the best of consciences. Only if a man tries to take his stand outside the world, as the philosopher of ethics does, he

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The converse of this is the concept of providence. Providence points to the possibility of evil not being ultimately victorious, but life building upon life and the prospect of even the most horrific evils leaving traces of God’s eternal presence, clamoring for redemption. At first it might not be obvious that the point is essentially the same as that of Emil Fackenheim’s famous argument in God’s Presence in History (repeated in an equally famous essay, “Useless Suffering” by Emanuel Levinas), that for Jews to cease to believe in God would be to become accomplices of the Nazi endeavor to eradicate the Jews from the earth.26 In Fackenheim’s and Levinas’s argument, the appeal is to the perpetuity of the presence of what deserves and is worthy of love. To be sure, their point is primarily a moral one, but its efficacy comes from the truth it recognizes. And it is the same truth that is central to Rosenstock-Huessy’s argument—although even more so. For his is not an appeal to what we think we are doing, but to what is being done constantly through us and in the world around us, that the living spark of the divine refuses to die so long as we draw breath. This is also why human beings constantly return to the sites of their injustices and pay tribute, why the dead refuse to be silenced, why the descendant generations that have fallen into evil and done unspeakable things are eventually forced to come to terms with their history as part of their own reality. Evil impresses itself upon generations. To be sure, its perpetrators may not lose any sleep over their brutality, but eventually the living must come to grips with the price of death that has been the very condition of their own existence. In this respect evil is not something that

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we can pretend is not there, nor simply pontificate about, but it is something with which the world continues to be made. Thus even something as horrific as the Holocaust refuses to recede into nothingness by virtue of the impression it leaves upon subsequent generations, now more alert to racism as one of (the d)evil’s forms. That human beings are so slow to learn about evil may be disheartening, but we can only work with what we have to work with, and that is the world at the moment, with all its past. Idealism is the delusion that the mind might leap over the forces of the present, and that the past is dead (and the dead do not dictate), and that the future is but a mental act away. Our aspirations point toward the future, which need to find some pathway of connection to the potencies of past and present. Idealists of every stripe are able to provide proscription and postures because they are beyond the world’s evil in their own minds. In contrast with this, Rosenstock-Huessy emphasizes how we live off martyrs, and that a moral pronouncement made from a safe place is not to be equated with a martyr’s action. In sum, Rosenstock-Huessy’s dissatisfaction with Barth and those like him is then dissatisfaction with a particular way of being in the world, which is common enough among theologians and philosophers. With theologians, at least, RosenstockHuessy shared some common names of appeal. But that did not amount to much for him when, as he says of Barth, there was no attempt “to translate the word of Christ in the living today.”27 In Ja und Nein, Rosenstock-Huessy’s late autobiographical work would return again to Barth, picking up and expanding upon the themes already laid out in 1920: Karl Barth is a Greek systematic thinker. The most brilliant critique of him was given by Rosenzweig. We wanted to see Samaritan thinkers, whose speech arose out of the occasion and the need of the hours to achieve the same authority as systems… Barth substituted his chemically pure disposition as theologian through his flight into exile from the antichrist Hitler after 1933. His courage was truly Maccaebean. So he was Greek in thought, but Old Testament in character. The Samaritan, though, is neither a Maccaebean fighter nor a Greek systematizer. He is a weak man, whom God can make strong, when necessity is need is in man.28

He also describes Barth’s falling-out with the Patmos group in general, and him in particular. He mentions how Barth had allowed his lecture on Christ in Society to be published by Patmos. Patmos, of course, referred to the island where John wrote Revelations. The name of the publisher thus reflected the hope of those gathered under the sign of the

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Johannine Age. For Rosenstock-Huessy it soon became clear that Barth was not interested in entering into the Johannine Age, but that he wanted to stay in the second millennium with his abstract theology: John knew that the word must become flesh. And that enabled him to act with Jesus independent from the visible church. Barth only, that there are churches and universities, and he move from a pastor to a Professor of theology. For us these buildings and establishments had surrendered the dignity of their original belief. Their credit seemed to be worn out for us. Our question was: how can man become worthy of faith? We experienced the First World War, but he didn’t. That is not meant as a complaint against Barth…we should only speak of experience (Erlebnis), if our thinking experiences a new date. Barth occupied himself with the World War as with other world affairs. Whereas, with us, the World War gave us a new marching route, a new time calculation, a turning away from theology and philosophy out of obedience toward the path of salvation. Damnation was decisive for us; for Barth it remained just a theme, an objective fact. I visited Karl Barth in Safenwil in Aargau. That was the village where my wife’s family originated from, and he officiated in the desolated community as a pastor… It sounded absurd to him that the university, which he then had in his sights and which I had torn out my heart over had, according to the magnificent formulation of Hans Ehrenberg, been languishing in a Babylonian prison from 1870 on (like the Church had in Avignon). That we experienced a new beginning, which opened up an endless future, a third millennium, contradicted his thesis that revelation had occurred once and for all. He simply could not understand that we could no longer continue theologically nor philosophically in the same vein with people who could not listen to the church anymore. This was because the damnation of the “Faculties” and the partitioning of thought didn’t plague him. The truth, which had been leached out of the ruling idea of “theology” since 1125 would have destroyed his life’s work.29

For Rosenstock-Huessy, Barth had then subscribed to divisions that he felt belonged to another time. Eventually he conceded that Barth had “restored” theology, but such acts of restoration were not what was needed. For him Barth asked: What is the Word: We: How can the word again become effective? He called the liberals to order, because they had given up the healthy teaching for a treat for the ears. We took our departure from the fact that we can’t live backwards. Ears which have become deaf against healthy teachings won’t be activated by merely repeating the teachings.30

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Wayne Cristaudo is Associate Professor and Deputy Head of the School of Modern Languages and Culture, and the Director of the European Studies Programme, University of Hong Kong.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY AND LITURGICAL THINKING DONALD E. PEASE

I

AM A LATECOMER to the work of Rosenstock-Huessy. I have read Speech and Reality, Out of Revolution, I Am an Impure Thinker, and Judaism Despite Christianity, as well as illuminating essays written about these works by Harold Stahmer, Clinton Gardner, and Hans Huessy. But I have not studied the entire scholarly archive, and Susannah Heschel’s invitation to speak at this conference is the first occasion that I have had to sort out my thoughts concerning what Rosenstock Huessy has called “speech-thinking.” Despite the fact that I am a relative newcomer to RosenstockHuessy’s work, I have nevertheless found uncanny similarities between what he described as the disciplinary circumstances out of which it emerged and contemporary academic conditions. I also discern family resemblances in the method through which he has articulated it and the post-structural logics that inform my thinking. Like Rosenstock-Huessy, I was dismayed to discover that crucial dimensions of creative life had been foreclosed by the normative assumptions of the academic field in which I had decided to do my work. It was because he was unable to render his concerns within any of the preexisting academic disciplines that Rosenstock-Huessy dissevered himself from their grounding assumptions and described his project as a form of “impure thinking.” Since I belong to a generation of academics who repudiated existing academic mentalities for having precluded ethical commitments and having been inhospitable to expressions of political hope, I have found his ethos of impure thinking especially helpful in its illumination of the problem of remaining entrapped within the ruling orthodoxies of academic disciplines. The discipline within the humanities with which I have been associated over the last thirty years has produced comparable difficulties

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for its practitioners. I teach and write literary criticism within the field of American Studies. As a scholar within a discipline that has displayed all of the symptoms—revolution, crisis, anarchy, distraction—that Rosenstock-Huessy diagnosed as in need of the re-orientation his speechthinking might provide, I come to his work with an attitude of openness. As a teacher, I also value the distinction that he has adduced between the ethical responsibilities and transformational potential attendant to persons involved in dialogue and the instrumental rationalities that would reduce its stakes to the mere transmission of facts: The self-concepts of both persons in this transaction are modified and grow out of this communicative exchange. The reality lies not in the thought one gives about self image, but in the responses one makes to the speech of the other. The self-concept undergoes revision if there is incongruity between the past understanding and the perceived relation of the other person. I came upon Rosenstock-Huessy’s account of the transformative potential of dialogue after reading Franz Rosenzweig’s remarkable witness to their conversations in Judaism Despite Chrisitianity: “In that night’s conversation, Rosenstock pushed me step by step out of the last relativistic concept that I still occupied and forced me to take an absolute standpoint. I had to recognize the justice of his attack… Any form of philosophical relativism is now impossible to me.”1 The post-structuralist theory that has informed my way of “thinking through” the crisis in literary studies is a distant relative of speechthinking in its understanding of the privileged role that discourse plays in conceptualizations of the world. Speech-thinking would at first appear to exemplify the logocentrism that deconstruction was designed to subvert. But it originates from what Rosenstock-Huessy has called a Thou - I relationship in which the demand to respond to the call of another preexists the I who is called to respond. But whereas the post-structuralist logic of supplementarity adds what totalizing reason invariably excludes from the academic disciplines it regulates, Rosenstock-Huessy has described speech-thinking in terms of four dimensions of the Cross of Reality. This constellation of forces effects its re-orientations by changing the spatial and temporal coordinates of whatever discourse it enters. Rosenstock-Huessy was convinced that historical crises in our human relations derived from the loss of this grounding orientation. This conviction led him to elevate grammar to the rank of a social science. Higher grammar tells of our innate faculties of reason, authority, wisdom, experience. A higher grammar must reinstate the reality of speaking and listening people in place of the nightmare of the speechless thinker who computes a speechless universe.2

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By beginning with an I, the emphasis is placed on the willed action of the individual. According to Rosenstock-Huessy, this egocentric attitude must be eliminated so that a different grammar can be introduced: “I hear so that I may come to exist” and “I respond although I shall be changed” In the Respondeo, “although I shall be changed,” the egocentric mind is subsumed within the Thou-I relations. It is by the strange conjunction of “although” that the new orientation embedded in the Thou-I site of address is invested with the capacity to overwhelm what Rosenstock-Huessy has described as the most reactionary part of our organism, our consciousness. First, as a listener to the imperatives which address mankind collectively, he hears himself addressed as Thou. This is his call to make the future. In gratitude for having been so addressed, he discovers his I, his subjective, singular and inward self. He then seeks to return the gift of having been addressed by being creative himself, by contributing to the generation of man. As he does so, he must form a dual, a We, as in marriage or in any other history-making attachment.3

In what Rosenstock-Huessy calls “higher grammar,” we move through each and all of our experiences as figures of grammar. The past time is created by the narrative speech of a we. Inner speech is created by the subjective speech of an I. Outside space is created by the indicative speech of the it. Futurity is created by the imperatives and vocatives that address a Thou. The alternative futurity evoked by these vocatives takes precedence over the social ontologies installed and maintained by habitual indicative, subjective, and narrative dispositions. Through the four figures—Thou, I, We, It—speech-thinking takes up its positions through us. But an individual’s actual life story originates in the response to a primordial apostrophe: “The soul must be called Thou before she can ever reply I, and before she can speak of us and finally analyze it.”4 And “ … we realize ourselves for the first time as our mother’s—or our father’s or our teacher’s—thou and you. I am thou for society long before I am an I to myself.”5 Despite the family resemblances between our modes of addressing the historical impasses confronting us, there nevertheless appears to be a gulf separating our standpoints. Rosenstock-Huessy’s essays are replete with what seem to be dogmatic statements that exceed my capacity to confer assent. Indeed his essays appear at times to be forms of liturgical worship rather than exercises in interpretation. Here are some examples: “Man never, never could live, speak, write or think unless he is the image of the Individua trinitas.”6 “The truth of eschatology is not a theoretical proposition to be rediscovered scientifically and put on our desks in the

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form of a book. It is an ever-threatening event to be reconquered on and by faith.”7 Although I find his accounts of speech-thinking breathtakingly edifying, like Franz Rosenzweig, I come away from Rosenstock-Huessy’s essays wondering whether speech-thinking also required belief in the precepts of Christianity as the precondition for its successful accomplishment. Speech-thinking may have emerged out of the historical impasses that Rosenstock Huessy confronted in his time, but is a leap of faith required to take up this re-orientation in the present? If it is the figure of the Cross that brings about this foundational reorientation in the grammar of social relations, is what Rosenstock-Huessy has called the Cross of Reality identical with the liturgical symbol worshiped by believing Christians? Must a thinker become converted to Christianity to participate in what Rosenstock-Huessy called speech-thinking? Is speechthinking a translation of Christian liturgy or does Christian liturgy supply Rosenstock-Huessy with metaphors for the event he calls speech-thinking? To address these questions, I have chosen to situate my reflections about speech-thinking in a discussion of the essay “Liturgical Thinking.” That is the essay from which the aforementioned examples of liturgical worship were drawn. It is also the essay in which Rosenstock-Huessy undertakes an explicit consideration of the relationship between Christian liturgy and what he calls speech-thinking. The following remarks are unevenly divided into three sections. In the first part, I shall try to explain Rosenstock-Huessy’s understanding of Christian liturgy; in the second part, I will discuss the difference between Christian liturgy and what Rosenstock-Huessy calls speech-thinking. And I will conclude these remarks with a close reading of what might be described as the liturgical event that takes place in speech-thinking.

I. Liturgical Movements “Liturgical Thinking” differs from the essays in Speech and Reality and I Am an Impure Thinker in that it does not translate the key terms in Rosenstock-Huessy’s lexicon into a secular grammar. The essay instead restores what appears to be their origins in Christian liturgy. The essay “Liturgical Thinking” does not merely supply Rosenstock-Huessy with a pertinent object of analysis; it reveals what happens when speech-thinking takes place. In so doing, “Liturgical Thinking” discloses the pedagogical stakes of Rosenstock-Huessy’s work, even as it calls for his reader’s reorientation.

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The two-part essay, the first part of which was published in 1949, takes its point of departure from the impasse produced by the contemporary resurgence of the liturgical movement and the secular rationalities to which the members of that movement were opposed. “Liturgical Thinking” is divided into two parts. In the first part, Rosenstock-Huessy explains the origins of the liturgical movement in terms of the historical crisis produced by the faulty translation of key liturgical terms, and in the second part of the essay, he performs what might be described as the liturgy of speech-thinking. The difference in the two parts of the essay is discernible in the shift of mood in its author’s statements from the indicative to the vocative. Whereas the first part of the essay unfolds a straightforward description of historical fallacies, the second part is organized around a prophetic call that would lead “Creatura hominis” out of the historical wilderness by clarifying these confusions into errors that speech-thinking alone can dispel: Here is how it was, “O Thou, creatura hominis,” and here is how it now will be. The essay was itself ostensibly motivated by the growing popularity of a liturgical movement that was repudiated as superstitious by secular humanists. The word liturgy derives from the Greek leitourgia meaning public (leitos) work (ergon). In its conventional usage, the term “liturgy” applied to rites of the Christian Church as a whole, and to the Eucharist in particular, as the great work performed by the Church, the corporate body of all practicing Christians. The liturgy includes the rites and festivals through which Christians commemoratively celebrate together the central mysteries of Christianity. The Christian community celebrates Sunday, the festival of the week’s beginning, as commemorative of the Creation; and Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost as festivals celebrating the mysteries of Incarnation, Revelation, and Redemption. It is through their participation in these liturgical services that Christians bear individual and collective witness to the living truth of these mysteries. But the liturgical thinking through which Rosenstock-Huessy explains the Christian liturgical movement differs from its putative objects of analysis in that it is irreducible to any of the liturgical forms under analysis. In writing the essay, Rosenstock-Huessy did not translate the theological aspects of the Christian liturgy into their secular equivalents, nor did he represent the key terms of speech-thinking—his Cross of Reality, the higher grammar—as revelations of the truth of Christian liturgy. He instead positioned both the liturgical movement and the modern secularism to which it was opposed as comparable heirs of the Counter-Reformation thinking to which liturgical thinking is irreducible.

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Describing the liturgical movement and experimental modern science as comparable mistranslations of the terminology within debates that took place at the time of the Counter-Reformation, Rosenstock-Huessy concluded that both of these modern movements originated from “too many concessions to this Renaissance mentality” that took place in the historical interim in between the Reformation and the CounterReformation.8 After he characterized the terminologies within the liturgical as well as the scientific movements as comparably faulty models of liturgical thinking, Rosenstock-Huessy proceeded to re-inhabit this historical turning point so as to restore the significance of the foundational terminology— person, nature, eternity, shame, individual, experiment—that was lost in the historical transition from the Reformation to the Counter-Reformation. Before 1500, time is rhythm and cycle, musical intervention and seasonal recurrence …Time was harmonious movement, not a quantitative accretion. But with the Renaissance … time was degraded to a concomitant of dead masses in space. It was no creature, had no rhyme nor reason … Again the Counter Reformation fought this enemy: by insisting on the “eternal.” “Eternity” was set up against this dead “natural” time. But it was with “eternity” as it was with the “supernatural” against a wrong conception of “nature.” Time once falsely conceived, is not cured by eternity. All our traditions of time, pagan, biblical, ecclesiastical, had contrasted the eternal with the eon of eons, the saecula saeculorum, the succession of human generations, the temporum tempora. In other words, we lose our access to the eternal if we contrast it to that fallacy of classical physics, a non-rhythmical, dead time.9

Having analyzed the modern liturgical movement in terms of the confusions that it shared with the modern secularisms to which it was ostensibly opposed, Rosenstock-Huessy reanimated a way of thinking about these terms that returned them to their foundational status as polarizing opposites. In the following passage, Rosenstock-Huessy explains the importance of restoring these terms to their condition as mutually dependent opposites, rather than antagonistic forms of reasoning, intent upon mutual annihilation. To paraphrase Rosenstock-Huessy’s discussion of liturgical thinking, in his essay of the same name: We must liberate the words nature, time, shame, creature from their dungeon in physics, and we can do this only by polarizing their light again. Time, as opposed to eternity, is the living eon, the cycle of our times. Nature, as opposed to the supernatural, is living, sprouting growth. Shame, as opposed to self-revelation, is the custodian of the threshold of the time when we are to lift our countenance to a wider or deeper view.

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The Liturgy of Speech-Thinking

In Rosenstock-Huessy’s view, nature, time, shame, creature are not conceptual terms denoting some objective reality. Rather than corroborating or invalidating natural or historical developments, these existential terms disclose the cooperative contrarieties through which natural and historical processes unfold. The antitheses of the supernatural, the social, the decent, the holy, the eternal must all be misunderstood, once the theses against which they stood have changed their meaning. … The theses I always knew to be wrong. The antitheses I always knew to be useless. This of course was purely negative. How my mind learned to become one, whole, indivisible again in its manners of thought and speech is a different story. And this story is the story of how the liturgy can become clear as the thread of Ariadne which leads out of the modern labyrinth, and makes the human mind again the temple of the living God.10

In the course of this passage Rosenstock-Huessy has shifted the focus of his attention away from an account of the historical origin of the false antagonisms with which modern thinking has become embroiled, and onto the form of indivisible thinking through which he would transfigure the entire human domain. Before he could successfully change the register of his discourse from an analysis of historical impasses to an account of the quintessential form of liturgical thinking, however, Rosenstock-Huessy needed to restore the original signification of two terms—individual and experiment—whose devaluation posed an insuperable obstacle to his demonstration. “For by the decay of these two terms” Rosenstock Huessy explains, “the present geopolitical crisis has occurred.”11 The individual celebrated in American individualism differs from the individual invoked by Rosenstock-Huessy in that the latter figure is what renders the I indivisibly associated with the Thou in the Thou-I relationship. Individualism—a term “stultified by modern secularism” for the individuum of St. Thomas Aquinas, does not have a factual meaning, as Rosenstock-Huessy explains: Individuum is a good Christian term as long as it means two qualities in one: 1. That which cannot be divided into smaller fractions by us: the atom. 2. That which we may not subdivide.12

Under the terms of this redefinition, individuum describes that capacity through which the polarities at work in time and eternity, mind

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and body, nature and creation become indivisibly re-united. The creature man could be called indivisible because he participated in God’s qualities and the world’s qualities at the same time. The “experiment” whose devaluation Rosenstock-Huessy laments differs from the transaction that takes place in a modern scientist’s laboratory in that it describes the operations through which the transfiguration of I into thou get accomplished: When we experiment, we imitate His serious, unique acts of creation by our playful acts of research.” But “We are God’s holy experiment. For we are in His crucible!…The scientific term is a [mere] loan made [to the laboratory] from God’s proceedings with his children… the experiment is not arranged according to the theory of the physicist, but it is offered us by the love of our Maker who proposes to us and tests our degree of loving response…Whenever [God’s] experiment succeeds, a human soul gives up her isolation!13

In the first part of the essay, Rosenstock-Huessy selected from liturgy certain passages that had undergone distortion in the process of historical translation. But in the essay’s second part, rather than translating or interpreting already-existing forms of Christian liturgy, RosenstockHuessy creates a liturgical rite specific to what he calls speech-thinking. This rite unfolds at a site that might be described as the primal scene of speech-thinking, wherein man in nature is transfigured into “O thou creatura hominis.” The phrase “creatura hominis” places man in the condition Rosenstock-Huessy calls a “teleological genitive.” As creatura hominis, I am addressed as that part of me which is yet to come!…Natural science annuls! The time of God spend on His beloved creatures is anulled. Time is regained for your future when creatura hominis is called out over you.”. You are now not natura, because you are not who you are but you are told who you are going to be. …a new era opens with this next step into creation … your shame is overcome by the unveil-removing power of a new birth. Creatur hominis…the Mass expresses this transubstantiation from natura hominis to creatura hominis in its whole formation, action and sequence…14.

But the crucible wherein man in nature becomes “O thou creatura hominis” is not part of any pre-existing liturgy in the Christian religion. This instructive ritual takes place as a continuation of the dialogue between Rosenstock-Huessy and Joseph Wittig that had begun two decades earlier when Joseph Wittig was the editor (along with Martin

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Buber and Viktor von Weizsäcker) of the magazine Die Kreatur, and that had been brought to a conclusion at Wittig’s death in 1946.

III.

Is Speech-Thinking a Liturgical Event?

Although their dialogue does not result in a new way of thinking about the liturgy, it does open into the following primal scene of relationality in which the words of Joseph Wittig inaugurate an ongoing dialogue in which creation and nature, Thou-I, person and subject, eternity and time, shame and blessing, are impersonated alternately by RosenstockHuessy and Joseph Wittig: Creatura Hominis means “O thou yet to be created child of man.” Strange as it may sound, there is no salvation unless we return into creation. Thinking man is only redeemed by thanking God again as a creature. The recently deceased Joseph Wittig taught me this. Two decades back he edited a quarterly, Die Kreatur, (The Creature). For its second volume, he translated the rites for blessing salt and water: I adjure thee thou creature of salt, by God who commanded thee to be thrown into the water by Eliseus the prophet in order that the sterility of the water be healed: that thou become consecrated salt for the salvation of the faithful; that thou be for all who drink thee health of soul and body; that thou put to flight and drive from every place in which thou art sprinkled all fallacy and wickedness and cunning of seductive illusion and all impure spirit; thou are adjured by Him who will come to judge the living and the dead, and the world with fire. Amen.15

After providing this translation of the blessing, Wittig added the following interpretive gloss: In the same manner, the Church also speaks to the creature of water, and it certainly is no accident that she does not speak to salt and water but to the creature of salt and the creature of water. Salt and water cannot hear what we say. They can only react chemically. Once taken out of Creation, they are dead and deaf and don’t react to Word and Spirit. And they are immediately taken out of Creation when they no longer are spoken to as creature. When they are spoken to, they stand in the realm of the “Thou,” where there is life and listening; otherwise they are in the realm of the “It,” into which neither speaking nor harkening can reach.16

Throughout his meditation on the blessing of the salt, Witting has deliberated over the significance of the blessing’s use of the term creature

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as the primary term of address. Their creaturely life brings into relief the aspect of the salt and water that continue to sustain them as living participants within the mystery of creation. Wittig describes the act of addressing them as “creatures” as the agency responsible for awakening this aspect. After having been addressed as creatures, salt and water are subtracted from already-created nature and restored to participation in the ongoing processes of creation. In his prefatory remarks to Wittig’s discussion of the blessing of the salt and the water, Rosenstock-Huessy explains the pertinence of what he calls the Thou-I relationship to what takes place through this blessing of the salt and water, as well as to the continuation of his dialogical relationship with Joseph Wittig. The entirety of this instruction is contained in Rosenstock-Huessy’s observation: “Creatura Hominis means “O Thou, yet-to-be-created child of man.” According to RosenstockHuessy, the Thou who invokes a creature to come forth as Creatura Hominis does not address the I of the past or the it that has already become part of the natural world. Thou insists on what is in representational excess of what it calls forth. The I who is addressed by Thou is individuum, or undivided from the Thou calling it forth, and through which it would undergo a transfiguration. After reciting Wittig’s words, Rosenstock-Huessy adds the following response: When they are spoken to as creatures, they are spoken to in the faith, therefore in virtu, and are sought and met in the living hand of God in which nothing can be dead or finished, but only living and becoming, where, for this reason, everything still is miraculous.17

Then he once again quotes Wittig as if they were involved in a vital ongoing dialogue: When the Church says, “Thou creature of salt,” perhaps she says so in order that she may address the salt at a moment in which it still is in the miracle-working hand of God as much as is the Church herself.”18

What does Rosenstock-Huessy mean when he says they are spoken to in the faith? He means that they are spoken to in the language that saves their appearances as part of the creation that is still in the process of creating, rather than part of the already-created nature—similar to the relationship of Spinoza’s natura naturata (nature in the process of what it does) and natura naturans (nature already extant). When Wittig says they are spoken to in faith, he means that they are spoken to through the

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dimension of speech through which creating still participates in the creative power of speech. The creative power of speech belongs to what is to come of saying, rather than the already said. The ongoing creative power of speaking bespeaks new possibilities of saying beyond the already said. This creative speaking ratifies the living faith by doing what faith says creation does; that is, open the heart, which through the harkening to the saying and the mind does the thinking about the said, into the Thou-I relationship. “Thou,” our first liturgical shape, although called the second person in grammar, is not restricted to humans. Creatures may reach the first phase of liturgical life if they are addressed as “thou.” Even the whole church. Thou yet-to-be-created child of man. But there is no salvation unless we return into creation. Thinking man is only redeemed by thanking God again as a creature. The response to “Thou, creatura!” is not mere passive responsiveness, but it means living in creation and giving birth to it out of oneself. Creatura, individuation, time, person—these are existential terms and not conceptual terms denoting some objective reality. They do not deny and invalidate nature and history. They give meaning to the antagonisms that have replaced them within the creation that includes this imperative. It is through this reorienting encounter, this “O Thou, creatura!” that eternity enters into time, fulfilling and redeeming it. Rosenstock-Huessy’s Respondeo to Wittig gives thanks to the saying by harkening to the Thou in the saying. The listener is elevated to the status of a Thou, who in turning to that which addresses; the living word is delivered—just as the child of the Respondeo is the creative response to the address “O Thou, creatura!”—from the futurity that has become alive in this dialogue. When Rosenstock-Huessy says they are sought and met in the living hand of God, he means that they are addressed within the creating power through which they came into creation. They remain indivisible, living within natural creatures’ manifestation of the creative powers of that which never stops creating but that becomes visible as eternal, when the positioning of things within history has been completed. At the crossroads between the already-created and that which is to come, whatever is not part of the created time but in which created time partakes, emerges into appearance through the invocation at the crossroads. Now at this crossroads two different iterations of temporality can emerge. “O Thou, creature-man!” can refer to the man who would bring about a bettering of what had been accomplished by completing the task that had already begun and that will continue into the future of that past.

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The Thou who is called forth in this apostrophe is the Thou who brings dignity to Wittig’s task by identifying his project with the accomplishment of whatever he had begun in the past. Although this I is already narrated by past events, this I nevertheless undergoes a transformation into the future passive indicative (“although I shall be changed”) that might improve upon what has been already accomplished by projecting a better deed into the future, through the resolve to do so n the present. The speaker who says “O Thou, creatura hominis” also experiences a changed relation to the I through whom this apostrophe gets enunciated. The I who says, “O Thou, creatura hominis” is neither the agent nor the patient recipient of the phrase. The I who says, “O thou, creatura hominis” is affected by the quite literally trans-figurative process through which this phrase changes the salt’s spatial and temporal positions within the world— from already-created parts of nature into creatures that are being newly called forth into creation. “O Thou, creatura hominis” communicates the creation from the standpoint of the futurity out of which the saying emanates. “I” undergoes a change in relation to enunciation from an I who speaks to a you in an already-created world to an I called forth by a Thou that demands I as the vehicle through which the phrase “O Thou, creatura hominis!” can be heard and acted upon. In a sense the capacity to say Thou removes the I from alreadyexisting speech conditions through which I gets re-enunciated and displaces all of those pre-existing speaking relations with a Thou-I relation exceeding all pre-existing conditions. Upon removing the already enunciated I from all pre-existing speech conditions, Thou transfigures I into the aspect of the Thou-I relation that addresses another as Thou. In order to address another as Thou, the speaker must have been separated from the condition of an already-enunciated I and called forth as Thou. Bespoken as a speaker capable of saying Thou, I am transported, out of already-established conditions of enunciation. And I am transported into the dimension of that which, lacking any already-enunciated position, undergoes creation through the very apostrophe, “O Thou, creatura” that calls forth a speaking I to come into expression. “O Thou, creatura hominis” calls for an I that is yet to come, such that it can call the creature salt from a future standpoint that is, from then on, about to be. The speech act, “O Thou, creatura hominis” takes place from a futurity in the present that is manifested and sustained through the speech act that takes the place of present. Throughout his meditation on the blessing of the salt, Wittig deliberates over the significance of the blessing’s use of the term creature

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as the primary term of address. Wittig describes the act of addressing them as creatures, as the agency responsible for awakening the aspect of salt and water, which continues to sustain them as living participants within the mystery of creation. As a repetition of the phrase that called them forth into creation, “Thou creature, salt” reactivates the creative dimension of the salt and the water and returns these creatures within the eternally recurrent process that Rosenstock Huessy calls speech-thinking.. The return of Thou to the realm of the ever-creating primal phrase, “O Thou, creature!” cannot be dissevered from the speech relations through which “O Thou, creature!” becomes utterable. When the speaker addresses salt as “O Thou, creature!” the salt becomes inextricably related to the enunciating figure (the creatura hominis) through whom “O Thou, creature!” becomes sayable. But the Thou who calls I out of the creaturely life is also drawn into a different relation to the already-narrated I from the past, insofar as it calls I into relation to what is to come that is not the future of the past. The I aroused by Thou emerges in the future passive indicative, “although I shall be changed” to produce a different world. The future that comes to pass through the past, but is irreducible to its positions, names what remains linked to the Thou dimension, rather then the already-created dimension. The apostrophe “O Thou, creatura hominis” would let this creative Thou dimension manifest alternative possibilities in human time. This Thou dimension does not take place in time, but takes its place each time the phrase, “O Thou, creatura hominis” is enunciated. According to Rosenstock Huessy, it is in this re-phrasing that eternal recurrence takes the place of the earthly unfolding of time. This phrase does not take place in time, but takes its place. Rosenstock-Huessy provided a clarifying account of this transfigurative process when he differentiated what he meant by the Thou-I relation from what Martin Buber had articulated in reverse. That is, Buber had published his seminal book, I and Thou in 1923, and subsequently continued his exploration of the “I-Thou” relationship in the pages of Die Kreatur, a quarterly that followed three years later and which he co-edited with Wittig, Buber, and von Weizsäcker. In an Editor’s note following an essay by Dorothy Emmet in Judaism Despite Christianity, Rosenstock-Huessy says: …the correct, truly “existential” sequence is not I-Thou but Thou-I. In his view, Buber’s I-Thou carries either the implication of a parity between the I and the Thou, or still worse, the implication that the I precedes the Thou in human experience. Thou-I, in contrast, quite accurately reflects an important reality that virtually everyone experiences, in one way or

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Citing “Liturgical Thinking,” Rosenstock-Huessy continues: The soul must be called Thou before she can ever reply I, before she can speak of us and finally it. Through the four figures, Thou, I, We It, the Word walks through us, the Word must call our name first.

“O Thou, creature of man” insists, at this vocative crossroads, on where the already-created and the creative are juxtaposed. Positioned here, the creature can either continue in its place of development among the already-created, or it can enter into the realm of the creative or creating word that discontinues what has been created through the evocation of what has not yet taken up a place. The apostrophe, “O Thou, creature of man” emerges from a temporality that, insofar as it is discontinuous with the present and the past, is describable as sheer futurity. However, since this futurity is not imaginable within any of the pre-existing positions through which the present is reproduced, “O Thou, creatura hominis” also calls for the creation of an alternative to present arrangements of things. Insofar as the phrase “O Thou, creatura hominis” emerges from the discontinuation of the past and turns the moment of its apprehension into the occasion for new creation, it can be described as the event whereby eternity takes the place of the time continuum linking the past to the present, and to the future of the present. The enunciation, “O Thou, creatura” takes all of the figures doing the addressing (Wittig and Rosenstock-Huessy) and the creatures addressed (Wittig and Rosenstock-Huessy, as well as the salt and the water) out of nature and into the primal relationality effected by the speech acts through which these figures are taken up in the address. As an activation of the power to call into creation, the speech act, “O Thou, creatura,” separates the addressees from the realm of the already-created and restores the creative virtue within their speech acts. The saying word is unlike the already-said word, in that it accomplishes what it says in the act of saying. After thus continuing his long-interrupted dialogue with his recently deceased friend, Rosenstock-Huessy adds the following responses to Wittig’s words: “…whenever mortal man leads the other creatures to their destination, we do not prevent, rather we complete their “proceedings” into that Creature which is in the process of being created.”20 Then he concludes his conversation with Wittig through the following meditation:

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Cor ad cor loquitor, Cardinal Newman’s motto runs. Under which conditions heart speaks to heart, Wittig tries to ascertain. Not when we worship a teacher or adore a woman or are spellbound by a spellbinder or enamored with art or are crushed by venerable authority does the heart speak to the heart. When Creature speaks to Creature, then cor ad cor loquitor. Only then have we been cleansed of our mental idols, For God has given us a heart of flesh; and no raging against the flesh may prevail against this fact. Few people understand this as the law of our intellectual life; the liturgy lives this law.21

In enunciating this response, Rosenstock-Huessy takes up the position of “O Thou, creature of man” at the mysterious crossroads where the already-spoken is conjoined with what remains to be said. The Thou who is called forth at this crossroads is the Thou who would bring dignity to Wittig’s words by identifying his project through Rosenstock-Huessy’s continuation of the thinking that Wittig had undertaken in the past. The I called forth by Wittig’s Thou emerges in the future passive indicative “although I shall be changed” to continue cor ad cor loquitur. But the Thou who calls Rosenstock-Huessy out of the creaturely life is also drawn into a different relation to all that Wittig has already said and thought. This Thou dimension of speech-thinking does not take place in alreadyenunciated phrases, but takes its place each time the phrase, “O Thou, creatura hominis” is bespoken. Insofar as the phrase, “O Thou, creatura hominis” does not take place in time but takes its place, it is the site whereon the eternal recurrence of speech-thinking takes place. The love to which these words have delivered him enable RosenstockHuessy to continue speaking heart to heart with Joseph Wittig, whose address to the creature in him has delivered him to the revelation of the creature who dwells in the flesh of the heart. Only when creatures speak heart-to-heart does liturgical thinking take place. When creatura hominis speaks heart-to-heart with a fellow creature, the living primal word Thou–I becomes incarnated as the harkening voice. This rebirth signals the birth of liturgical thinking for the creature man, the creatura hominis, “the child of man yet to be created.” If this site is the primal scene where what Rosenstock-Huessy calls speech-thinking takes place, this scene does not belong to any liturgy other than the reading practices through which Rosenstock-Huessy’s readers continue to harken and respond in the cor ad cor loquitur. Donald E. Pease, Jr., is a Professor of English, the Avalon Foundation Chair of the Humanities, and Director of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN FROM HERE TO ETERNITY: THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY OF EUGEN ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY AS ESCHATOLOGY ON THE TRANSMODERN INSTALLMENT PLAN

MICHAEL ERMARTH

And all living history connects the past with the future. —Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Wo keine Götter sind, walten Gespenster. —Novalis History is the future making the past present. —Martin Heidegger

The Man and Thinker: His Eschatological Perspective in His Excruciating Times

A

S MANY OTHERS IN HIS COHORT of German and European emigré thinkers (including most anti-Nazi refugees in the United States), Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy strived to advance a whole new order in the world inaugurated by a radical shift of attitude or mindset among its inhabitants. He was an unabashed futurist, but of a very special polyhistorical, pan-traditional bent. He remained a fervent if selective defender of many Western traditions; but he was also a candidly eschatological, rather than liberal progressive or secular utopian thinker. He did not think small or merely mid-range; nor did he think mildly, moderately, or accommodatingly toward most modern suppositions and standpoints. In contrast to our current era, he did not favor scaled-down, surrogate micromessianisms; comfort-zone niche-numinosities; or tentative mini-

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epiphanies. Nor did he think that the current modality of Western modernity was bound to continue as the culmination or end of history. Viewed from an eschatological standpoint of absolute faith beyond reason, he believed history had other ends in store beyond what is called modernity. There would be no eternity for modernity, as it too was destined to be supplanted by its own end. He was even-handedly ecumenical, cosmopolitan, and syncretist in the cause of remaining open-minded and open-ended. But he stayed openended toward a very insistent, even obstinate, end. He was a forthright Ganzheitsdenker, taking the long and whole view of first and last things. He remained holistic in method and benignly totalitarian in perspective— to counter what he thought to be the largely unacknowledged, malignly totalitarian tendencies of modern life and society. He was committed to moving forward beyond what is now called classical or high mass modernity, as the normal order of things, with its densely complex combination of liberalism, secularism, rationalism, market capitalism, mass electoral democracy, industrialism (including industrialized agriculture), and ever-advancing high (and ever-higher) technicism. As a convinced Christian eschatologist proleptically looking out for—but also back from—the end of the world, he contended that mass secular modernity was becoming obsolete, or even “Stone Age,” as he put it, when viewed from the more perspicacious perspective of the end of time. Like other ages before it, the modern age would pass into history, to be supplanted by something else, which would somehow be more surprising, experientially richer, and more sensibly eternal. In Rosenstock-Huessy’s version of Western history (which his main historical work, Out of Revolution, personalizes into the revealing subtitle Autobiography of Western Man), his transmodern trajectory arises necessarily out of a double (but not simultaneously synchronized) revolution-as-revelation. It will be a great turn that is both individualpersonal and social-collective. All revolutions are radical and more raptural than rational. However, despite their own professed claims of radical interruption, they cannot be complete and utterly rauptural, as they per force remain in a kind of “dialogue with each other over the passage of history. In a kind of vast extrapolation of personal experience backward and forward through time and space, Rosenstock-Huessy extends the intense I-Thou (or Thou-I) interpersonal dialogue of two persons (for example, he and Franz Rosenzweig) into the trans-historical conversation among the great revolutions of the West.1 Hence the German Reformation and the French Revolution remain in a kind of to-and-fro dialogue, which was not face-to-face, but epoch-to-epoch in the revolutionary tradition

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itself. These radical dialogical revolutions remain interwoven into an uncanny trans-historical, trajectory, or tacit polychronic social contract toward an ulterior end, yet to be accomplished. They transcend themselves in dialogue or reference and relevance to each other, so they do not happen in isolation, nor exert influence through any absolute break with past tradition. They are, so to say, tradition-bound and tradition-inflected radical revolutions, despite their professed claims to break with tradition. Indeed, in order to claim to be radical, they have become what Rosenstock-Huessy claims as traditional. As continuing the Western revolutionary tradition of the past, Rosenstock-Huessy’s transmodern transformation is projected as a major surge into the future, which carries forward the same a deep watermark that stays mostly tacit and unrecognized through the passing (and recording) of historical time. It will be a conservative revolution of everlasting proto-Christianity, drawing unconsciously upon earlier revolutionary traditions. And as the mother of all revolutions (indeed, trinitarian father, mother, and son as originary spiritual gene pool of all revolutions), Christianity remains its true source and inspiration, as Christianity forms the wondrous and indelible, if temporarily occluded and less familiar watermark of all Western civilization for all time. Rosenstock-Huessy insisted that it is high time for this eternal watermark of Christian eschatology not only to show its outlines more visibly again, but also to rise, re-write the book of history, and thereby help turn the page of history on the already-fading, wanly overfamiliar order of secular humanist mass modernity. The latter would thereby be relegated into the soon-to-be obsolete Old Testament. Rosenstock-Huessy’s projection of such a transmodern third millennium can be interpreted as an assertively neo-Christian or New-New Testament eschatological trump of his friendin-dialogue Franz Rosenzweig’s three grand epochs of “cosmological antiquity,” “theological medievality,” and “anthropological modernity.” In sum, Rosenstock-Huessy proceeded to write his own special Book of Revelation / Revolution in which explicating the underlying Christian watermark inherent to the Western revolutionary tradition also entailed a trajectory not only “out of revolution” into modernity but “out of modernity” itself. This great transmodern transformation was presented as stemming from an intimation / inspiration of the (not just a) new numinous future. His proleptic stance that, insofar as life and history have meaning, they must be led or inspired from ahead, neither caused nor causally driven from behind, remains forthright and unwavering. History transpires much more as a process of half-conscious proleptic expectancy than of closed

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determinist causation. “All the revolutions of Europe share this same heroic rallying of past and future against a rotten present.”2 If not condemned totally on all counts as a completely “rotten present,” the present age of mass collective modernity was judged by RosenstockHuessy to be overripe for its own overcoming. Rosenstock-Huessy was speaking out of many traditions at once, some very old and some much more recent. One of these was a powerful undercurrent of twentieth- century German and European thought— flowing through left, right, and center of the political spectrum—intent upon what can be called, amending Karl Polanyi, the great transmodern transformation. Rosenstock-Huessy’s revealing subtitle, “The Modern Mind Outrun” for The Christian Future (1946) becomes even more sharply pointed in the 1985 German translation’s subtitle, “Wir überholen die Moderne” (We overtake the modern). These directional tropes toward an explicitly stipulated transmodernity were more than idiosyncratic gestures on his part, as they came from a modern homeopathic tradition with its own special watermarks, one that was deeply and holistically critical of modernity itself, usually for its “mass,” “bourgeois,” or “mammonistic” character. The burden of Rosenstock-Huessy’s Western “autobiography” of modern revolutionary development clearly echoes other contemporary calls for a radical holistic “transreformation” of the modern age and modern mindset. These are exemplified in Johann Plenge’s socio-political writings and Oswald Spengler’s dark prophecies for the modern “Faustian” West in his best-selling The Decline of the West, published and popularized in the immediate wake of World War I. There came into being during the 1920s and 1930s a whole German critical lexicon of neologisms and coinages to convey the movement beyond Western mass modernity. It was perspicaciously deemed an intermezzo, interim, vestibule, waiting room, or even modern medi-oevos (that is, recent modernity as the then-current version of the “dark” Middle Ages), awaiting its secession, revolution, or totalizing Copernican turn. Rosenstock-Huessy repeated many of these exact formulas, sometimes in close conjunction: “I call this secession the Interim” or elsewhere touting the impending “secession from our era.”3 The acute, almost neuralgic sense of transience afflicting the turbulent Weimar period 1918-1933 was superimposed and extrapolated onto Western modernity as a whole, giving it a kind of parenthetical enclosure: It was not simply an interim autobiography of modernity but an anticipatory valedictory or peremptory obituary. The autobiographical and existential roots of Rosenstock-Huessy’s historical thinking are palpable to anyone reading his works, as he directly

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alludes to them throughout his writings. But some of these core watermark experiences may warrant a brief re-telling to set the stage for a more detailed explication of his general views. His core experiences carried a cumulative transformational thrust, a crucial-conversional trajectory by way of his continuing reflection on them, starting with his heartfelt conversion to Christianity at the age of sixteen in 1904 from a well-to-do secular and cosmopolitan Berlin Jewish background. In obvious contrast to Heinrich Heine’s more glib formulation of his own conversion as securing the “entry ticket” to Gentile German polite society, Rosenstock-Huessy’s conversion seems to have been anything but perfunctory, nor does it seem to have been a conventional exit ticket from any growing Wilhelmine-era anti-Semitism. The young Rosenstock-Huessy became a fervent Christian, steeped in strong currents of neo-idealistic Lebensphilosophie and Kierkegaardian existential thinking. He was especially steeped in the emphasis on concrete, lived experience and empathic understanding in the form of compassionate comprehension (Verstehen), as opposed to strict scientific method issuing in nomothetic explanatory laws. Like many of his generation, Rosenstock-Huessy was transfixed by the crux of the Thou-I speech situation of intimate conversation or dialogue of subject-to-subject, which was posed in stark contrast to the subject / object or I-it relation. The predominance of the latter was held culpable for much of the harshly predatory inhumanity of contemporary society. The concurrent counter-cultural pathos of the prewar German youth movement seemed to promise a great leap forward from the sterile routines and crippling trammels of bourgeois society. Just before the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Franz Rosenzweig, who as student of the historian Friedrich Meinecke had written a major work on Hegel, expressed his yearning for a deep, abiding faith impervious to “the curse of historicity.”4 The most promising way out of the impasse or curse of the sense of self-relativizing historicity and the sterile fact-based objectivity of historicism and scientific reason was a “speaking thinking”—a compassionate thinking in dialogue. Rather than the heaven-storming dialectic of Manichean opposites, ordinary everyday dialogue between persons became the special pathway to transmute debilitating historicity into a sense for the eternal. The historical watermark behind the crucial hyphen in the Thou-I relation remained the Christian cross of divine love, which requires, but also surpasses, all human understanding. Catalyzing and reframing these early influences, there loomed the preeminently “excruciating” shock experience of World War I, in which Rosenstock-Huessy served at the battle of Verdun, the most horrific and protracted front in a war of mind-boggling, endless attrition. Rosenstock-

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Huessy was on the Western front, whereas Rosenzweig, his dialogical “Thou” in these years, served on the Eastern front in Macedonia. The war experience set the stakes and grounds of their cognate style of thinking, and vastly reinforced their sense that human life is lived not only “deathwards” but, even more crucially, “endwards.” Existential categories had become personal, lived experiences for millions and millions, most of whom understood little of the larger stakes of the global conflict. Rosenstock-Huessy returns over and over to World War I as the climax watershed, as revolution and revelation in one: “The war was the great revolution for all European civilization.”5 World War I remained the crucial event, even if it had not yet fully become consciously apparent to his cohorts—or even himself, as he admitted apologetically in 1938: “I am still pointing at the World War, and shall always do so. Surely, then, my book must lag far behind. I am conscious of this crime.”6 His personal perspective widened into the European and global one, signaling an end of the old order and its buckling spiritual and ideological props: The war was the great revolution for all European civilization.7 The World War was a World Revolution: it ended Marxism as it ended liberalism.8 All this book long, one vision that slowly ascended before my inner eye on the winter morning at Verdun …9

The World War I era of 1914 to 1924 came to represent both watermark and watershed in history—the super-condensed summation of all previous wars, revolutions, and upheavals. As veteran of both the vaulting hopes of the prewar German youth movement and the escalating horrors of total material war, RosenstockHuessy shared his own generation’s disdain for the bourgeois German “religion of culture” as a snobbish form of surrogate idol-worship. The traditional German respect for culture was being perverted into a hightoned cargo cult of conspicuous display of artefacts, furnishings, and supremely good taste. German spiritualist / idealist culture was subject to special perversions and hypocrisies of surrogate religiosity. For his part too, Franz Rosenzweig lampooned German “Goetheology,” just as Goethe had once chided Germans for their ersatz quasi-religious “Fichteanity.”10 Both young men, especially after their military service, heaped scorn on “cultural onanism,” “silly academicism” and “the pedantry of the

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unnoticeable”—much as Friedrich Nietzsche had excoriated the snooty “philistinism of culture.”11 Alongside the debunking of misdirected bourgeois culture worship, there were clear echoes of Wilhelmine and Weimar social reformism in Rosenstock-Huessy’s impassioned postwar “labor-service” on behalf of the vitalization of the factory, suburbs, campus (university and adult education) by way of the new spirit of the campfire, the soldier, and the work / study camp. A new ordering of things beyond current practices was both possible and urgently imperative—a craving for radical change that the militant Nazi and Communist movements channeled into ideas of total revolution and total mobilization toward a new future. Ideas of radical and total transformation took many forms, valences, and agendas, drawing many secular intellectuals like Martin Heidegger, Johann Plenge, and Oswald Spengler into proximity to Nazism (and many others toward communism, with very little dialogical “hyphen” in between). By contrast, the Nazi agenda was sufficiently sinister to Rosenstock-Huessy to drive him out of Germany to America in 1933. This trans-Atlantic transplantation to the United States, however, continued to reinforce his intellectual momentum toward the transmodern as an overcoming of the modern. Like many other grateful European emigrés secure in their new country, he still regarded America with pronounced critical distance. As a much-touted land of the future, he saw it to be stuck in many outdated Stone Age habits and increasingly awash in foamy ephemeralities.

Generic Philosophy of History as Tradition: Its Deep Background and Urgent Foreground In its sweeping scope and poignant intensity, Rosenstock-Huessy’s philosophy of history remains recognizably in keeping with the German speculative genre, which is usually associated with Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Spengler. But alignment in this tradition hardly means close accord: Rosenstock-Huessy stresses over and over that he is arguing expressly against (or dialectically beyond) these well-known thinkers and their schools of influence. Indeed, Rosenstock-Huessy’s practice of the genre was much closer to that of the German Romantics Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) and Friedrich Schlegel. The characteristically German but also very human urge to philosophy of history was compactly encapsulated by Thomas Mann in Doctor Faustus as the profound yearning for “the higher interpretation of crude happening.”12 Philosophy of history thus represented the prodigious confluence, or extension by other means, of all sorts of competing tendencies in Western thought, including myth,

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religion, moral philosophy, disciplinary academic or “scientific” historiography, the emerging social sciences, and the general mindset of Western historicism. Its doubters have always contended that this grand effort at synthesis—a tradition in its own right that comes into and goes out of style—was overwrought and over-ambitious, a kind of theoretical house of cards or another Baron Münchhausen adventure. Philosophy of history aspired to transcend the narrow, specifying, and analytic particularism of a soberly scrupulous archival / documentary method, which came to define critical, or scientific, or disciplinary / academic history in the manner of Leopold von Ranke and his followers. The latter produced assiduously “historical history,” whereas philosophy of history aimed to be altogether more holistic, more vital, and more profoundly illuminating of human affairs in their supposed totality. Philosophy of history aimed for holism and totality from various perspectives, thereby rising above the petty methodical cult of facts. The cult of facts was the fatally debilitating “faitalisme” and enervating historicism that Nietzsche mocked as a chief abuse of life itself. Philosophy of history remained freely suggestive, speculative, allusive, and disposed to high flights of grand generalization. It was macro- and meta- in relation or scale to the matters that it treated. Skeptical critics, including Rankeans and others, considered it to be wildly fanciful and phantasmagorical. (At Dartmouth Rosenstock-Huessy taught “social philosophy,” not philosophy of history, much less “eschatology.” He claimed that his own “macroscopical method” was intended to avoid “the Scylla of disordered detail and Charybdis of meaningless generalities.”13) In this peculiar role, philosophy of history has served as an orienting compass par excellence, even if it was never a practical instrumental GPS device for traveling across times, as many now have on their dashboards for traveling across spaces. The big question has always persisted: What can be its real underlying magnetic poles or reliable triangulation points, if any? Compasses do not work without magnetic poles or relatively fixed points for reliable triangulation. But space is not time, as RosenstockHuessy repeatedly emphasizes in his work: What of this relative configural fixity can be found in human history? Whatever its intrinsic “magnetic” attractions, force-fields, and compass points, philosophy of history has been a synthetic interpretive impulse that flourished off and on during the modern period. That is, it flourished during and after the Enlightenment and the period of the French Revolution and Napoleon, after the midcentury European 1848 revolutions, and during and after the harrowing world wars and world revolutions of the twentieth century, when it reemerged with special virulence and urgency. It seemed to make larger

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meaning out of human confusion, chaos, upheaval, suffering, and anxiety. Understandably, such traumatic times that try men’s souls tended to elicit ambitious philosophies of history—alongside myriad surrogate myths, synthetic socio-political ideologies, and would-be religions. In Rosenstock-Huessy’s unique framework of ordinary or everday eschatology, these vertiginous crisis times continue happening virtually all the time, in all history large and small. The present moment, even in banal normalcy, remains always an excruciating “cross” (and creative crossing-over) time, the eternal-existential moment of Goethe’s resurrecting imperative of “die and become” (Stirb und werde!), which can serve as the pithiest summation of Rosenstock-Huessy’s entire eschatology—and as semielegaic motto for the overtaking or outrunning of modernity. Rosenstock-Huessy’s trajectory toward the transmodern was implicit or immanent in his view that Christianity and eschatology must remain inseparable and inexorable. He claimed that he was merely rendering into explicit, intelligible, and articulated patterns the implicit or tacit deep contexture of historical time. He spoke of raising the deep, permanent watermark (invoking the imagery of the Jesuit writer, Hans Urs von Balthasar) of historical time into the legible and meaningful Word or true Logos of the future. “That is why Christianity and the future are synonymous.”14 He deemed this same eschatological fixation on the future to be equally characteristic of the modern disguised theologies of socialism, communism, fascism, Nazism, pragmatism, crusading Americanism, and other foamy modern doctrines of messianic deliverance. His futurism becomes self-reinforcing in the method of reverse chronology applied in Out of Revolution, in which his account is not only framed as a selfenclosing autobiography,, but written from the present (1938) backward over an entire millennium into the distant medieval past. It starts with the (then) still contemporaneous World War I / Russian Revolution and proceeds backward a thousand years to the Gregorian Revolution. One could well say of Rosenstock-Huessy’s philosophy of history that it places last things first—and with the ulterior end always on the proximate historical horizon. It is only logical (or eschato-logical) that Rosenstock-Huessy fiercely rejected all of the conventional figurations or tropes for representing Western historical change, including (1) secular linear progress of upward and onward (either steadily ascending unilinear or agonist dialectical zigzag), in multiple variants of Whiggish liberalism, Hegelism, Marxism, Comtean scientistic positivism, or American utilitarian functionalism and pragmatism; (2) repetitive cycles, as in Spengler, Giambattista Vico,

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Polybius, and pagan antiquity; (3) additive spirals, as in Benedetto Croce and Karl Polanyi; (4) senseless fluctuations or sheer run-down entropy as in Pitirim Sorokin and Roderick Seidenberg; or (5) fluctuating residues and recrudescent avatisms as in Vilfredo Pareto and Sigmund Freud. Rosenstock-Huessy trumped (or combined) all these tropes and figurations into his final, ulterior configuration of the Christian cross itself, but extemporized into the constant crucials at work in human history. Only the Christian cross remains for him genuinely orthogonal with real developmental history, as real progress (and notably, progress beyond liberal secular mass modernity) is bound up with Christianity and its eschatological telos. Christianity exerts both its temporal priority and logical a priority over all history: “Precisely because Christianity created future, progress is the gift of the Christian era, and it vanishes in proportion as we secede from that era.”15 All progress must entail a radical breakthrough or revolution—or, as he sometimes puts it, a true “crusade”—toward the open future that Christianity has already foretold but not at all foreclosed. In contrast to the Lutheran “liberty of the Christian man” (but also woman), modern secular progress remains a helter-skelter, peristaltic frenzy of paltry substitute aims. It reminds one of a mundane wild-goose chase in which the goose—not to mention another feature of goose lore, the sought-after golden egg—are both always shapeshifting according to current fads and trends. The wild chase of modern progress must be anchored upon a cross of crucial commitments: “A crusade is conservative. Its purpose is to stabilize the very background and premises of progress...”16 The watermark always persists across the floodtides and watersheds of all revolutions; this is the very meaning of tradition, itself. Rosenstock-Huessy’s trope toward the transmodern arises seamlessly out of his Christian eschatological convictions: They are really the convergent underlying tendencies expressed as a single overarching trajectory. He is candid in admitting that he has faith in something utterly transcendent, not merely vaguely and vaporously transcendental. He shuns liberal secularism’s hollow, tepid, and reflexive “faith in faith” for a forthright militant commitment to first and last things. “No people can live without faith in the ultimate victory of something.”17 He believes in the victory of the ultimate end, over all shifting fixations upon the purported beginnings and storm-tossed middles: “Belief in an end of the world, or ‘eschatology’ is thus the very essence of Christianity. Yet, until recently, the modern world had virtually forgotten about it.”18 Eschatology seems quite un-modern, un-progressive, and un-empirical as it asks not whence we have come but toward whither we inexorably will go: “It begins with

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the end, the consummation of things.”19 The resonantly archaic words whence and whither would carry the suitably traditionalist accents for Rosenstock-Huessy’s transformational semantics of re-sounding or dialogical Umläutung—that is, a mutation or assimilation of two sequential sounds into one new one. Often gloatingly, Rosenstock-Huessy insists that both academic history and philosophy of history—like all human thinking—remain constructs or acts of faith. By nature and nurture, humans are constrained both to make and to find the meaning they seek. Revising James Anthony Froude’s skeptical apothegm that “history was like a child’s box of letters with which we can spell any word that we please,” Rosenstock-Huessy asserts that we are left to make—and find—a deeper meaning in what has already been made up and deposited by others in tradition.20 The previous Western revolutions subsist for him “like letters in the alphabet which we call Western civilization.”21 Coming always with its own grammar and syntax, the alphabet that makes up the crucial watermark-words of the grand narratives—redemption, progress, mobilization, emancipation, faith, hope, crusade, war, end—cannot be reduced to alphabetical atoms. Insisting that grammar “is the future organon of social research,”22 he called for a macroscopic “metanomics” of modern society to disclose the manner by which unrecognized systemic sclerosis was occluding the watermarks of vital meaning. If hardly the pure speculative thinker of unpolitical or metapolitical inclinations, Rosenstock-Huessy’s vaunted “impurity” was not strongly political, whether left, right, or center. He pilloried both the extreme right and left, but he tended consistently to balance liberalism’s emphasis on emancipation and rights (from the state, but within the state) with a countervailing stress upon bonds, obligations, and responsibilities— whether to family, community, nation, or nature itself. He sees as much catastrophic, pseudo-religious mischief transpiring on the left as on the right. His jibes at Liberalism and Liberals (often in the triumphalist typography of capital letters) were less severe than his attacks on socialism, fascism, and communism, which come across as more sinister but also faltering and infirm. In his telling, the latter grand ideologies seem to be already consigned to lower-case status by passing into mere episodic historical history. They are episodic ex-eschatologies being overtaken, but without their adherents really recognizing it. In seeking some conventional political compass points in the mapping of his thought, it is tempting but misleading to align Rosenstock-Huessy along the edges of the currents of the Weimar “conservative revolution,” which was announced by Hugo von Hoffmansthal in Munich in 1927. This

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strand or tangled braid was composed of a mix of embattled Christians, Machiavellian cynics, despairing ex-humanists, proto-fascists and cryptofascists, militant anti-Bolsheviks, who all demanded a radical revolution to salvage dimensions of the past. If only occasionally, Rosenstock-Huessy celebrates the sheer final power of ulterior decision-making and executive commando authority—“the ipse dixit of authority”—that sometimes must prevail over protracted discussion, delicate compromise consensus, plodding public palaver, and sloganeering talk-shows given to what he calls “modernist fudging.”23 His Weimar background and the Weimar specter of the “deadlock of democracy” remain palpable here. Rosenstock-Huessy observes dejectedly in this regard: “Many Germans accepted the Nazis because, in their despair, they felt that mad decisions were better than none,”24 sounding much like Kierkegaard, Carl Schmitt, Spengler, and Moeller van den Bruck. This echo of top-down, commando-style “Prussian socialism” or “war-socialism” does not readily comport with his stronger alternative emphasis on speech and dialogue. Rosenstock-Huessy’s call for a radical turn to viable traditions, however, was framed not exclusively or primarily by grand ruptures, but also by way of small, patient, and intimately personal and conversational little steps. He was highly dubious about this Weimar strand: “Conservatives now insist on being as revolutionary as anybody and defy those who might call their undertaking reactionary.”25 Or a few chapters later: “Any counter-revolution is sterile.”26 “Today ‘national revolution’ is being planned or brought forward in many countries to stop world revolution.”27 On balance, Rosenstock-Huessy seems more of an incremental “liberal conservative” in the manner of an Edmund Burke than a Carl Schmitt, Hans Freyer, or a Tatkreis member. As paradoxical as it sounds, Rosenstock-Huessy remains a Burkean intent on trumping the radicals Honoré Mirabeau and Leon Trotsky, in almost exactly the same sense that Novalis had congratulated Burke on his “revolutionary book against revolution.” There is for Rosenstock-Huessy no going back in history, precisely because history is always pulled from ahead, not uniformly pushed from behind. The pan-historical social contract is not merely between contemporaries under a regime, constitution, or generational cohort, but among past, present, and future. He seems far more Burkean than Machiavellian or Schmittian in stipulating that “there is an unbridgeable gap between … palpable institutions and palpitating faith.”28 Rosenstock-Huessy’s jarring emphasis on both war and conversational dialogue, as the deepest inner experiences instilling the special solidarities of “Thou-I” and “we ourselves,” but also “us-them,” can be disconcerting,

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to say the least. A sympathetic reader can infer that he regarded war as a kind of failed dialogue gone to hell. He clearly takes war very seriously because of its intrinsic ipso facto seriousness; like William James, he continues groping for its moral (or sacral / ritual) equivalents. He takes American poet Robinson Jeffers to task for despising war when it needs to be viewed in the cross’s light.29 “The Cross has always asked man to live as a warrior.”30 The “war community” remains somehow indelible and valuable as a transforming watermark, to be spiritualized into the Moral Equivalent of War ethos of Camp William James. And he retains more than just trace elements of the Frontkämpfer mentality of soldiering on, do-and-die for the last and lost outpost: “Not until history is ended can there be peace.”31 But pathos and ethos are not the same as doctrinal agendas and ideological positions, although demagogues know exquisitely well how to pull off this shell game. Rosenstock-Huessy insists that the total modern ideologies that mobilize and rationalize modern total wars are slated for the evaporation chamber of history that dispels false messianisms. True spiritual form must not be confused with ideological foam. “The two world wars were the form of world revolution in which this new future reached into everybody’s life; the nationalist and communist ideologies with their dreams of revolution were checkmated and are mere foam around the real transformation. The real transformation was made by the wars, and they made the Great Society final.”32 The major ideologies contesting in the world wars and world revolutions are, he says, being dispelled as so much surface “foam” rather than persisting as spiritual watermarks through the waves of ongoing transformation. History as an act of faith—that is, regarded eschatologically from its end, cannot be all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Rosenstock-Huessy’s philosophy of history shows some very clever turns and sly recursive twists, often undertaken with biting wit and pungent word-play. He would certainly have concurred with British economist John Maynard Keynes that “words ought to be wild.” His dandyesque word-play and grammar-play, however, generally harbored an ulterior serious point to it, flipping many standard usages and cloying clichés inside out and upside down in the ulterior cause of a word-induced shift of mind or reflective metanoia. His whole theory of history itself proceeds as a kind of extended pun on the notion of Umläutung: Even in its sudden revolutionary lurches, history can proceed only as a transformation of prior meaning, as in transliterating or re-sounding, or Umläutung or trans-enunciating—all of which metaphors comport well with Rosenstock-Huessy’s emphasis on the centrality of speech. He insists that so-called modern secularism is just a milder, less tendentious

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substitute term for ancient paganism.33 This latter term (and idea) retain more offensive, and therefore galvanizing, potential. For all his own personal humility, what Rosenstock-Huessy says of the speaking and thinking style of the Englishman—(“His language excels in understatement, in the tropes of ‘meiosis’ and mild irony”)—applies less to his hyperbolic claims for eschatology and philosophy of history than it does to his own manner of elucidating others.34 The antithesis of mild meiosis remains hyperbolic exaggeration, which in its Barnumesque, demagogic form of advertising and propaganda has become the predominant style of modern mass man and modern collective life. It takes a kind of dialogue between the styles of mild meiosis and militant hyperbole to show the enduring watermarks of Western tradition. His patterning is fairly straightforward, although with an eschatological axis, it starts at the forward end and works back to beginnings. The eight great revolutions of the medieval-to-modern millennium of 1000 to 2000 AD—Papal / Gregorian, Italian (Renaissance), German (Reformation), English (Glorious Revolution), French, American, Russian, and WWI—all remain quasi- or paraChristian, even if they did not recognize it. In Rosenstock-Huessy’s account, they remain eschatological messianisms and will properly come to be seen as “proto-neo-Christian” in the sense of relying (if derivatively, in masked disguise) upon the watermarks of hope, love, and faith, rather than science, reason, and causality. The transposition of meaning in dialogue—as re-sounding or Umläuten—does not have the bold binary simplicity of dialectical opposition or plainly antagonistic antithesis. His fascination with the subtleties of language, which is reminiscent of J. G. Hamann and the Romantics, enters constitutively into his philosophy of history. His love of surprise becomes a kind of sustaining credo: “Either time is a chain of surprises, or it breaks down into a helpless conservatism,”35 After Christ as the true personal crux and watermark of all history, Rosenstock-Huessy’s only unalloyed heroes and creative hopes remain Pope Gregory VII, Pierre Abélard, Blaise Pascal, Friedrich Schlegel, Abraham Lincoln, and William James. He offers some tepid praise for Luther, Napoleon, Bismarck, Wilson, Mussolini, Lenin, and Trotsky, but he is not much impressed with the pomposity and hubris of profane political power. He clearly disagreed with Napoleon’s dictum that “power is never ridiculous,” which Henry Kissinger turned into “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” The genuinely satanic, power-crazed anti-Christ figures of Hitler and Stalin are in Rosenstock-Huessy’s history but not really of it, as they seem to fall outside its tradition-bound, axial parameters. The Nazi swastika (Hakenkreuz, meaning hooked or hook

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cross) and Communist hammer and sickle both serve to symbolize the counterfeit deformations of Christianity’s originary symbol. They remain archeo-reactionary and false-futurist double-crosses of the original Cross. They remain trapped in their own “pagan” death whirl. His unwavering belief that human existence is meaningful only as consocial and consensual living-in-dialogue is accompanied by a corollary stress upon feminine / feminist contributions or gifts as utterly integral to the timeless existential watermarks that suffuse all times. “Western man,” he eagerly acknowledges, includes “Western woman”—albeit in the background or watermark sense that is always somehow more significant than the male-dominated fuss in the foreground and top echelons. These reverentially female-friendly comments recur constantly in his writings, if in a subtle sub rosa, but inspirational, tone reminiscent of exultant Romantic androgyny. The feminine dimension is always at work in the true dignity, sanctity, and ecstasy of the everyday, and thereby becomes a kind of future-nurturing impulse to remediate male-dominated modernity, with its restlessly relentless will to power instead of love. Balancing his respect for the warrior, his esteem for the eternal feminine is translated into the coeval self-disclosure of the historical feminine. His brief but effusive wonder at the humility of the bride, the acute pain of the woman in childbirth, the maternal solicitude implicit in all human caring—all these provide the feminist foil or counterpoint to his keen suspicion toward historical potentates flush with male hubris. This is especially found in Hitler, the Supreme Bachelor–Führer, married solely to Bride Germany and Almighty Father of the New Race; and in Stalin, the Man of Steel forging New Soviet Man in the incandescent blast furnace of history. These two anti-Christs both pandered to the “crucial” half-conscious depths of gender and sexuality, entering into a short-lived anti-Western, Machiavellian marriage of convenience, and soon fell into total war. There persists a congenital lag factor at work through all history; although it might be offset or compensated somewhat by a new form of metanoia of reflective awareness. Rosenstock-Huessy insisted that man’s conscious, reflective awareness (and hence the mental framing and naming as “cadrefying” and categorization) of things tends perennially to lag behind the crucial big structural shifts, as evident from modern total wars: “However, the technical war had run off faster than the evolution of the minds and souls involved in the struggle.”36 Consciousness and reason always trail after crisis, war, and revolution, in part because the mind tends to focus on surface disturbances and proximate causes. Our mental gestalt of the world’s surface patterns lags behind the real gestalt shift taking place in the events of the world. “But the mind is always far behind

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events.”37 “We can only close the door of the barn after the horse is stolen.”38 As Hegel’s owl of wisdom taking flight at dusk, reason always trails behind revolution-as-revelation. Similarly Marx held that all history goes on “behind our backs” or behind our blinkered, barely opened (or masked) eyes; hence real change is out of reach for both awareness and action. The tragedy of an ever-present gulf between historical transformation and lagging human awareness cannot be bridged or mediated by false futurism, the facile optimism of confidence games, or puerile notions of progress. Rosenstock-Huessy contends that America, despite well-worn claims to be “the land of the future” actually exhibits this lag much more than Europe, because America has been less deeply “excruciated” by spiritual and physical suffering. America’s wars did not accelerate its necessary awareness “The American consciousness always was a half-generation behind the military event.”39 The conscious and conceptual mind tends to lag well behind the soul’s ordeals and sacrifices. If oriented toward the end, humans still remain polychronic, Janus-faced, and susceptible to the torments of “double-crossing”: “…all men are men because they face backward and forward at the same time. We are crucified by this fact. Nobody lives in one time.”40 We struggle to be contemporaries and partners with others but we remain torn-apart “distemporaries” to ourselves and to our own cohorts.

Western Modernity as Moloch of Mass Organization with Ersatz Eschatology: The Western God That Fails Through Self-Divinization Instead of Dialogue There is a totalitarian tendency in the modern rationalizing imperative of modern man and modern thinking. And this applies not merely to modern man under totalitarian monocratic regimes: “It does not require dictatorship to make a society totalitarian in its impact on man. Our modern World Society is as totalitarian in its way as Confucian China was.”41 Modernity moves like an inertial mass toward an unrecognized “total mobilization” that reflects more and more upon sheer means, rather than ulterior values and purposes. Rationalistic modernity is meansspirited with a kind of blind, or one-eyed, vengeance. But this singlemindedness will be its own ultimate undoing: “… our time bears the features of a mere interim of pragmatic expediency.”42 Max Weber’s hard “steely casing” of modern society still shows an other end impending beyond the confining bars. Driven by the unholy trinity of economism, technics, and scientism, modernity tends by its own logic to become totalitarian, a new god or

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moloch unto itself. The dynamic of substitution of higher by lower remains almost as inexorable as it is imperceptible, so that “Economic systems have to be restrained from becoming religions.”43 For all its revolutionary origins and radical upheavals, modernity tends to fall forward into a deep rut of frantically competitive routine, a high-speed monorail promising success and fulfillment and happiness. But deeper forms of personal and collective meaning tend always to be deferred in favor of pre-set, other-directed aims, which no longer nurture genuine selfhood or genuine otherness. The future does not stay open automatically; it has to be re-opened by your own inward death and renewal. Not steady movement in one direction but continual re-direction, breaking through old ruts, is the formula for [true] progress.44

Modernity directs and reassures itself with its own ortho-myths of steady self-confirmation: A myth is a form of mental life which pretends to be deathless; its kernel is always a fixing of the mind on some transient thing which thereby is immortalized. Nothing on earth is good or forever. The myth pretends it to be.45

The modern myth of progress remains ubiquitous and self-stoking. Modernity tends to elide not only distressing shocks, including future shock, but also the creative gifts of interim surprises. Modern rationalistcum-pragmatist thinking tends to get stuck in the self-reinforcing habits and hubris of ultimate control, manipulation, and management. His laundry list of modern idols and messianisms—“art, science, sex, greed, socialism, speed”—is quite reminiscent of Ortega y Gasset’s five S’s in The Revolt of the Masses, the dismal sequence of science, sex, sentiment, sport, and speed.46 Rosenstock-Huessy uses the phrase, “revolt of the masses,”in a footnote in The Christian Future, but also cites it and Ortega y Gasset in Out of Revolution.47 Against the mental habit of smugly preening presentism—the alluring inertia of sheer hic et nunc—Rosenstock-Huessy re-launches an explosively critical epigraph from his American paragon, William James, which the latter thinker lobbed squarely against modern civilization: The most significant characteristic of modern civilization is the sacrifice of the future for the present, and all the power of the science has been prostituted for this purpose.48

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Interestingly enough for his idea of intellectual traditions as resoundings in dialogue, Rosenstock-Huessy consistently uses William James against John Dewey, who remains his paragon villain of twisted pragmatic scientism. In diametrical contrast to his respect for William James and the crucial “will to believe,” Rosenstock-Huessy regarded Deweyism as a superficial, vapid philosophy of conformist adjustment, of “keep smiling” while supinely fitting in.49 This bland and banal pragmatism was the perfect formulaic recipe or “social grammar” for the success of systemic mass modernity. Modernity is destructive of sources of human meaning and vitality: a kind of crucifixion by routine and banalization. “Modern man is crucified already. The salvation he needs is inspiration for his daily toil and leisure … The other world is in this world as man’s destiny, man’s meaning.”50 Modernity has hollowed out the well-springs of community and common endeavor. “We have all lost our anchorage in the rhythm of a community. Who will regenerate the forms of social life which function like harvest home, and funerals, and sunsets, as the framework of our life?”51 Sadly true for his new homeland America, which thinks itself as the leading edge of modernity: even avant gardist bohemian Greenwich Village is in the Stone Age. The Old Thinking of modernity remains indentured to the Cartesian universal rationalism of mathesis universalis, but with the crucial, added Baconian element of a practical utility: knowledge is finally about power, not reverence, contemplation, wonder, or love. With its abstractive, scientific, reductionist, proof-seeking, this modern method splits the world into subject / object, reason / nature, and I-it. The truly New Thinking, on the other hand, is concrete, personal, experiential (erlebend), dedicated to the meaning manifest in Thou-I communication. It is attentive to subtle layers and vectors of meaning, of situational and conversational nuance, with an urge to I-lessness through ulterior un-selfing. It is more poetic than prosaic, to use the Romantics’ favorite polar contrast. Like the German Romantics, Rosenstock-Huessy associates these truly humane qualities of the New Thinking with the timeless “eternal feminine” of almost instinctual non-self-aggrandizement: “These are a woman’s deepest secrets and treasures, unknown even to herself.”52 The feminine perspective may approximate the Thou-I ordering of true dialogue better than the masculine, which puts I before Thou. Rosenstock-Huessy’s delivers scorching critiques of both the modern masses (or “publics”) and modern elites, especially the publicly-oriented intelligentsia. He thereby offers a damning two-pronged attack on modern civilization, without much credence bestowed upon Karl Mannheim’s idea of a “free-standing” intelligentsia. Such bilateral criticisms are harsh but

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they certainly exonerate Rosenstock-Huessy from any suspicion of being either a populist panderer or snobbish elitist. Modern man has cultivated what he calls “the double-feature of extreme self-control and extreme scepticism.”53 Man is excruciated by living life in modern conditions but left alone, bereft, and disoriented because he has lost track of the crucial enduring watermarks (like axial centrality of the Cross itself) in favor of the next new thing: “The selfindulgence of Reason is its predilection for the new.”54 Mere fashion takes the place of habit, ritual, and wise reflection upon the temporal interface of transience and eternity: “Reason cannot understand eternity or old age.”55 From its more concerted and self-conscious inception around 1500, Western modernity has been systemically pre-disposed to various messianisms and grand eschatologies. The profusion of the latter has been much accentuated and accelerated by the massive involvement of “mass” publics in reading, schooling, working, voting, and relaxing. The profusion of science, technology, bureaucratic administration, national or imperial “destinies,” aesthetic avant-gardes, counter-cultural coteries and salons, gestural youth rebellions, and consumer fads and fashions have all been deemed to be at the dynamic core of what seemed to be the promise of “endless” modernity. The widespread belief of automatic modern progress has remained an almost universal myth and fallacy of the age itself.56 The characteristic watermark of secular progress remains, however, a fading but cunning counterfeit of Christian providential eschatology. Modern ideologies are “political religions.”57 Fascism and communism inspire and serve as totalizing secular eschatologies; but so too does pragmatic liberalism, and shares in these tendencies.58 Rosenstock-Huessy dismisses most scholarly research and erudition in the humanities and social sciences as arid pedantry, unacknowledged redundancy, or barely concealed poly-plagiarism, which Schopenhauer derided as “the sciences of that which is already known or of that which is not worth knowing.” With some of the old Frontkämpfer showing through, Rosenstock-Huessy excoriates “the emasculate mind of scholarship.”59 Rosenstock-Huessy was blistering on the foibles and proclivities of “King Mob”—the mass public manipulated by myth, propaganda, and the hidden persuaders of smarmy and moronic advertising.60 The masses remain largely passive and indifferent to history, and think mostly in predictable, even archetypal ruts: “The primitives know no history. That is why the modern masses adore primitivism.”61 They want not the abiding watermarks of their deeper history, but new brands, new icons, and new myths.

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Although he renounces cultural pessimism and general “declinism,” he insists that it “signifies the capitulation of theology before science; and is part of the suicide of Europe.”62 Modern systems of nomics and ologies—as in the schematic models of economics, political science, sociology, psychology, and anthropology—tend toward delusional selfinflation. The cunning insider tip for sure-fire academic success from an unnamed college president (perhaps Ernest Hopkins of Dartmouth?): “Doubt within your science, never doubt your science”63 —serves to abet the conformist tendencies of “the emasculate mind of scholarship.” (He did not seem to hold his own metanomics and eschatology to the same standard of radical doubt, probably as they were already looking back to modernity and judging it with new terms and new standards). The totalizing systemic tendency of modern managerial science is to reduce life to a rote repetition compulsion: “The full inbreak of free and divine future has been excluded by careful organization.”64 The procrustean amputation of whole aspects of human personhood for the sake of a templated mould or pre-engineered prosthetic model rebuilt out of replaceable parts—this processing of persons results not in real personal growth and fulfillment but a sorry chaos of neurotic insecurities: “The modern individual—externally a homeless, shiftless, noncommittal nomad, internally a jig-saw puzzle of nervous conflicts…”65 Or “The World War, with its sequel the Russian Revolution, was the last total revolution tending to cast all men in one mould.”66 But American suburban life is barely better: it is “prudent, kind, barren.” in which the golden mean turns into “golden mediocrity” leaving insatiable urges to adopt a pre-packaged, media-generated stardom.67 The loss of the sense for unique individuality at all levels of life—of persons, events, stories, cultures, languages—templated into the homogeneity of a managed world. The modern “hell of mere functioning.” degrades the crucial truth that “Every a has to be preceded by a creative the.”68 The public’s addiction to headlines, statistics, records, and numbers shows its insatiable hankering for distraction.69 The craving for news is a drug habit, like cigarettes.70 He observed this decades before the newest hybrid specters of “infotainment,” “edutainment,” and “advertorials.” Adspeak has succeeded in co-opting the adjective revolutionary to flaunt new fabrics and vacuum cleaners. What he terms “the wrong doctrine of humanism” arouses cravings for quick-fix panaceas and short-cuts, which short-circuit the will to love and reverence with the impatient will to power—and foreshortened into “right now.”71 The corollary degradation of speech into hype, “hullabaloo,” and formulaic incantations engenders the characteristically modern combination of blase indifferentism and

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double-bottomed or double-crossed cynicism.72 “The law of deterioration from inspiration to routine holds for speech as for other phases of life. Every time we speak we either renew or cheapen the words we use.”73 He laments the outcome of this devolutionary process: “the languages degenerate into propaganda. They decay before our very eyes, though they may survive as fossils for another thousand years.”74 Whether in capitalized or lower-case letters, Rosenstock-Huessy lambastes liberalism as harshly as socialism and fascism, primarily for its long-term desacralizing of proper names and transcendent norms into mere abstractions, reductions, and nominalization. “Liberalism as mere anarchy of beliefs or values does not impress me. But liberalism as willingness of parents to give their children a futuristic eduction strikes me as great.” Indeed most extant liberal education, even at prestigious universities, does not fare any better than liberalism itself: current liberal education traffics in “carloads of inessentials that are dumped daily on the student’s brain.”75 The professoriate and intelligentsia serve contentedly as the new secular clergy, saturating their flocks of students and readers with smug, sclerotic orthodoxies, announced under the perennial endorsement of “newness.” He argues that the passing of the current age of total revolutions into an impending era of global economic organization will continue to be riven and shaken by stubborn “tribal” and group identities. The age of total revolutions has passed away. A unified society with a multiplicity of tribal characters and national types will be the leit-motif of the centuries before us.76

There is some faint kind of residual consolation in this “tribal” impulse toward difference, as it assures a kind of variety that can be as richly creative or restorative of future possibilities, as it is threatening, frictional, or inexpedient by modernity’s measure or compass. “By the modest Re- as in Revolution, Restoration, Renaissance, Renovation, Recuperation, Reversion, Reproduction, man is separated from the rest of his fellow creatures.”77 Weighed on this higher (or later) scale of variegated differences, the New World of America and its vaunted modernity do not fare any better than the Old World through Rosenstock-Huessy’s lens. Indeed, in some ways it fares even worse for being even later or more gravely retarded in its lag of awareness. America has been laggard in learning from Western and European history, but even more ominously, from its own history. It seems more taken with “historylessness” and blithe futurism—a nonexcruciating eschatology of progress—than with harder, less-expedient truths. On America’s exceptionalism as its notorious “history-lessness” or

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peripheral “exemption from history” (which had been much remarked in the 1820s by Goethe, Hegel, Marx, and many others), Rosenstock-Huessy quotes Carl Schurz, with pungently ironical effect. (Like RosenstockHuessy, Schurz was a German-American émigré of an earlier refugee cohort. He was a ’48er, not a ’33er, who fought as a Union general and became Lincoln’s Secretary of the Interior and a strong advocate of clean, upstanding, efficient state government.) Schurz, addressing an audience in Boston in 1881, proclaimed confidently: “Happy is the country that has no history. America has not much of it and should try to have even less.”78 For Rosenstock-Huessy, this prescription is woefully wishful thinking, a kind of quietist Confucian delusion or Deweyesque form of complacently escapist ersatz-eschatology. American exceptionalism should instead be framed fully within Western history in its fullness, not outside it, along with all the other excruciating national exceptionalisms. With their diametrically opposed eschatologies, Rosenstock-Huessy’s view has certainly tended to prevail over Carl Schurz’s, in the sense that for America the destiny of “more history” has supervened over the craving for “less history,” as manifest in its dynamic “Faustian” modernity, including its prodigious war-making potential and war-waging historical continuity through the twentieth century—and beyond.

Conclusion: Can Rosenstock-Huessy Speak Meaningfully About the Next New Thing Beyond Modernity? Harold Berman concluded his introduction to the 1969 revised edition of Out of Revolution with the apt and intriguing words: “RosenstockHuessy was a prophet who, like many great prophets, failed in his own time, but whose time may now be coming.”79 Was he discernably prophetic in a timely—or trans-timely or poly-chronic—way? I would like to conclude by elaborating on some reasons why this might be so, reasons that have recently grown in public awareness and discourse. Can we of today venture to prolepticize prospectively—not merely historicize retrospectively—this obscure master of proleptic thinking, which kind of thinking remains the most obscure and difficult by starting with the future rather than the past or present? (One might note here the firing in 2008 of a senior White House aide for plagiarizing Rosenstock-Huessy’s essays, which clearly discloses something relevant here: Plagiarism always remains the sincerest form of flattery and flatteringly devious relevance—taking Rosenstock-Huessy’s words as a “thou” for the aide’s own “I” without attribution).

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When a huge majority—80 percent—of Americans think their country is “on the wrong track” and most probably “in decline,” the obscure, portentous-sounding terms “existential” and “transcendental” have surfaced in the presidential campaign, probably as “foam” or “spin” in the wretchedly degraded American political vocabulary. But at least they seem to sound serious for what seems more and more like very serious times; they carry with an Umlauted tone or accent of re-sounding gravitas. Rosenstock-Huessy’s perspective may come to seem more pertinent to today’s world in view of current controversies and discourses, the stakes of which seem to be crucial and relevant in very urgent, even apocalyptic ways. Apart from their eschatological framing, his views shows affinity with some current cultural commentators of the non-“foamy,” nonjournalistic ilk, that is, serious social thinkers on the order of Stephen Toulmin, Zygmunt Baumann, John Gray, Anthony Giddens, William Pfaff, and Ulrich Beck. With this resounding chorus, his “impure” thinking may serve to highlight some large and inconvenient truths we seem to be verging toward. He would probably observe that yesterday’s “posts- can turn easily turn into tomorrow’s “-cides” including ecocide, genocide, and even anthropocide. There seems to be growing public unease at the steady degradation of spiritual / cultural / existential matters—or just plain serious things and terms for their communication—into the media-moronic inferno of political-economic spin and media-driven “corpo-capo” popular culture. The so-called culture of consumerism and the “religion of shopping” translate for doubters into the sad bargain or tragic-trade-off of sacrificing qualities of life in favor of piling up quantities of things. It’s a very old conundrum, but it has some new limits and vectors to it, for which Rosenstock-Huessy’s vocabulary of crucial, excruciating, and crossing beyond self-made hells and stale-mates seems apt. If even history is no longer what it used to be, so then too “apocalypse now” may change and shape-shift over time. A rapidly mounting sense of slow-building, but now acute, apocalyptic changes that were missed, perhaps catastrophically, by a dire attention lag. This is no longer the old saw of the discrepancy between intended effects and unintended consequences, for the latter are now seen as stretching backward and forward for many generations, and ’way out into the atmosphere. As Western-style dynamic development finds no less eager practitioners in other parts of the world, these turbo-capitalist dynamics and the limits of the natural environment seem to be falling out of any confidence-inspiring synchronizing of timely adjustment. In mythopoetic terms, the deranged hubris of a buccaneering Faust II is meeting the nemesis of outraged

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Mother Nature in an obscurely visible epic of everyday planetary selfdegradation and destruction. Thou-I dialogue might come into play here in some old/new ways: It was the nature- philosopher Schelling who claimed that nature should be attended as a thou, rather than a mere it. Barring such cautionary reminders, Goethe’s “die and become” may be transmuting into the more alarmist—or tragic motto: “Die by following your own individual and collective habits of trying to become something you shouldn’t even try.” Continuing human survival and truly improving quality of life (in contrast to quantifiable standard of living) may require much different models, metrics, and “grammars” for conveying non-exploitative solicitude for nature and other persons. for humble everyday enactments, for the little interpersonal exchanges that bind all us “little people” into something more than units, atoms, and gene-repositories for instrumentalizing a power-play for the next new thing, including designer bodies, designer children, and designer wars. There may be something amiss with the grand design behind all these designs: at least there are signs and symptoms that the designs are not working the way they were intended. At the present star-crossed juncture, it makes historical sense that religion would be reviving in a substantial way—if also in a transformed umläutend manner seems to corroborate Rosenstock-Huessy’s traditioninflected ulterior progressivism, which keeps religion on the “radar” as an eternal watermark of human existence. Secular humanism by contrast seems to be on hold, if not faltering into outright retreat. But on a more sinister note, there remains the connection of religious revival to the socalled “clash of civilizations” and “war of the world.” (Book titles on remotely serious subjects always tend to involve thumbnail philosophies of history.) The emerging reconnection of religion to versions of tribalism, racialism, and “identitarianism” seems to bear out many passages in Rosenstock-Huessy’s works that in turn bear out Goethe’s observation that “the particular is always more than a match for the universal.” As Rosenstock-Huessy predicted decades ago, the spreading universality of globalization would call forth the “local” resistance of tribal particularity. Reflecting on European developments in the 1930s, Rosenstock-Huessy prophesied: “Economy will be universal, mythology regional.”80 He also observed presciently, at least for Europe: “State sovereignty is doomed. Yet it cannot be sacrificed until some other road is open.”81 Tribalism remains for Rosenstock-Huessy a kind of necessary couterweight to the pernicious effects of global economic organization:

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With a conscious economic organization of the whole earth, subconscious tribal organizations are needed to protect man’s mind from commercialization and disintegration.82

The remarkable piling-up of various “post” conditions—postindustrial, post-national, post-liberal, post-statist, post-progressive, postEuropean, post-Western, and most recently the “post-American century” comes into play here. A few years ago these trends were said to indicate the arrival of “postmodernity,” but the latter seemed to resolve itself into a playful game of bemused, floating irony, with no crucial markers, watermarks, meanings, or serious stakes at all. For Rosenstock-Huessy this post-modernism would have seemed too “foamy” and frivolous, as these same “post-” trends (perhaps proleptically swallowing postmodernist theory too) should more properly be aligned toward into a forthrightly transcedence-seeking transmodernism that does not pretend to be “postreligious” or post-eschatological. The reframing of politics and power relations in terms of “political religion” has gained adherents like Michael Burleigh, Mark Lilla, William Pfaff, and others. As noted by Rosenstock-Huessy decades ago, the favored distinction between interstate and civil wars seems to steadily eroding, with the potential for escalation and destrictive violence even more enhanced. Rosenstock-Huessy would reluctantly concur with the title, both platitudinous and shocking, of the American bestseller by Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning; but he would also insist with William James that the existential high-alert of war must somehow be transmuted into our everyday lives through practices creating the Moral Equivalent of War. There has also been a return to the yet-darker category of “political existentialism,” holding that politics concerns something crucial, even absolute, at stake. The dismissive old German adage that “politics is mere polish” (Politik ist Politur) is overtaken by a sense of existential urgency. Unhappily, political religion or mythomaniacal metapolitics may be due for a revival. “Now the political value or force of religion is its endlessness...Only the infinite can move the finite. There lies the fatal superiority of faith over reason.”83 And the rest is—or will be— history unto its end.

Postscript In lieu of any proper “ending” to this complicated story, one might be moved by Rosenstock-Huessy’s eschatological philosophy of history to observe that any larger framing of history by mere mortals, bound in its coils and complexities, remains a kind of human dialogue—and only that.

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Whether as philosophy of history or just “historical history,” its telling remains a kind earnest conversation about important matters. If such a conversation in medias res points toward a transmodern future, it does so by remaining a vaguely signifying pale “watermark” glimpsed with some ironical distance. But it cannot limn the eschatological fate of the world nor can it attain any total philosophy of history. It remains a history from a muddled middle, not the history from the end of time. Memory, story, and history (and their more elaborate rendering into methodical historiography) remains open constructs first and last — and ones that can only start and finish with a very personal voice. Rosenstock-Huessy had such a voice, speaking in terms of old and new ends—but the conversation will continue to go on. Michael Ermarth is a Professor of History at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN EDUCATION IN THE SHADOW OF CAMP WILLIAM JAMES PHILOSOPHY, PRACTICE, AND THE POLITICS OF EDUCATION

CLAIRE KATZ

Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself. —John Dewey And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you— ask what you can do for your country. —John F. Kennedy Author’s note. I wish to thank Susannah Heschel for inviting me to participate in the 2008 summer conference on Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy, which she hosted at Dartmouth College. I also wish to thank Wayne Cristaudo for including my essay in this volume and Frances Huessy for helpful comments on the final version. This essay is dedicated to my colleague John McDermott, whose contributions to classical American philosophy are immeasurable, and to my grandmother, Reva Kobre and the memory of my grandfather, Sidney Kobre, who, like McDermott, are part of a generation that profoundly understood teaching as both the enflaming of the mind and the call to service.

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N HER 1956 ESSAY, “The Crisis in Education,” Hannah Arendt offers a challenging critique of progressive education.1 For Arendt, the problem with progressive education is founded on several confusions—each resulting in succession from the previous one. Although the child-centered approach in progressive education is a response to a previous confusion whereby children were thought to be little adults, the pedagogy that progressive education offers is just as pernicious. In Arendt’s analysis, progressive education does delineate between a child’s world and an adult world, but this separation had the dangerous effect of essentially leaving

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children to their own devices. Teachers are no longer the authority in the classroom, and the tyranny of the “child” majority, Arendt astutely observes, can often be more tyrannical than the absolute authority of the adult teacher. This confusion led to a similar confusion in the public and private spheres, where education, by virtue of the state mandate surrounding it, pushed schools, education, and childhood into a political realm. She argues that the privacy needed for children to grow and mature, relatively undisturbed, has been compromised by this thrust into the public arena.2 Contrary to the view that education is political—and progressive— Arendt believes education is conservative, in the most literal sense of this term. Her argument for this position lies in her view of natality and action. Children are born into a world and it is the responsibility of both the parents and the teachers (read, the educational system) to educate them about this world. Not the world to come, not the world it might be. Education lies in the gap between past and future; its goal is to enable the future by teaching about the present (which includes the past). Without knowledge of the world in which they live and the past that influenced the coming-about of this world, children and then adults are in no position to effect change. We, as parents and teachers, must take responsibility for this world, even if it is not the world that we created and even if we wish it were different from what it is. Children are new, but they are born into an old world. To educate them about the possible new world, and not this old world, is ironically to close off their possibilities—to educate them with a particular future in mind is already to imagine the new world and thus limit their education. In spite of being motivated by change, and inspired to make the world a better place, we ironically wind up with a fascist educational system. For Arendt, then, education is not about action, nor is it about the creation of the new. Arendt’s definition of the public space reveals that we are forced simultaneously to take risks and to engage in self-restraint. Her concern is that the latter has the potential to stymie growth. Education should remain a private space in which this self-restraint is not required. One can see Arendt’s position. A brief look at the history of the child star, or of the children of famous people, supports Arendt’s point. Continually placed in the public’s view, many of these children never develop into flourishing adults. Nonetheless, my concern is that Arendt’s view of education is paradoxically both optimistic and pessimistic. On the one hand, her optimistic view that self-restraint is not required in education contradicts not only many of our personal experiences with education but also her own goal of education as a kind of cultivation.3 On the other, her

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pessimistic view that making education a public space would stymie growth runs counter to the progressive view that specifically endorses individual growth and development, via the pursuit of one’s own interests, ideas, and activities. Instead, we might note that education provides the diverse set of equal individuals, not between the student and teacher, but among the students themselves, such that the plurality of voices that emerges in the classroom would enable one to practice speaking and acting. I find myself in sympathy with Arendt’s position. However, when pushed to its end, one wonders what she sees as the purpose, function, or even value of education. Arendt defines the political as diverse equals coming together to create something spontaneous. For her, the political is precisely that which is not practiced; it is that which is itself spontaneous and unexpected. Many of the examples of political action that she provides even indicate that those who acted had personal histories that would not have predicted or anticipated their future political activity. That is, although education is thought to enable the future, it is not clear that Arendt sees any connection between the education one receives and the possibility of political action that will affect the future. If this is the case, then one wonders why any educational system could be recommended over any other. That is, can—or should—any line be drawn to connect education to the political? If not, then we need to rethink the role of education within American culture. If so, then we must ask if we can do this without compromising the other aims of education. I open my paper with Arendt’s analysis of the crisis in American education, from kindergarten through high school, for two reasons. Her critique of progressive education necessarily reinvigorates the age-old question of the respective roles that theory and practice play in education. This question, in some form or other, lies at the heart of every debate about education: the return to the basics, core education, vocational training, critical thinking, service learning, and so forth. In many cases, but certainly not all, theory and practice are viewed as mutually exclusive, and we can see how this same controversy has spread to higher education. The liberal arts are viewed as useless and are positioned against the vocational disciplines that translate immediately into a job—for example, engineering, nursing, business, and so forth. Second, Arendt’s comments nearly anticipate Eugen RosenstockHuessy’s remarks on teaching in his 1959 lecture, “Man Must Teach.”4 In this speech, delivered to the Parent-Teacher Association in Southern California, Rosenstock-Huessy also laments the current state of American schooling and offers an analysis very similar to Arendt’s. Yet,

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Rosenstock-Huessy, influenced by William James’ essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” recognizes the need to cultivate leaders who would commit themselves to service in order to secure the world’s future. Although his earlier essay, “Soldiers of the Impossible” (1942), makes explicit reference to William James’ “Moral Equivalent of War,” it is in this 1959 lecture that we find the more philosophical connection to James.5 Implicit in Rosenstock-Huessy’s discussion is an emphasis on an education that blends theory and practice. For Rosenstock-Huessy education encourages both spontaneity and creativity, but it also calls us to service.6 Rosenstock-Huessy begins with the following anecdote. In the 1930s, a friend of his, a widow living in Beverly Hills, wrote to the superintendent of the school system that her children attended to complain about the education they were—or were not—receiving. The superintendent wrote back: “Madam, you must forgive us. For the last 30 years, we have not believed in teaching.” Though his lecture does not indicate his exact response, I suspect that upon hearing this comment, Rosenstock-Huessy must have felt complete despair. The speech he delivered to the PTA that evening was about the role of teaching not only in the school, although certainly there, but also in the community at large. In the speech, he explored the ways in which he believed we all already are teachers and must be teachers. The introduction to his speech indicates that he sees teaching as a “function as important as breathing, singing, praying, dancing, voting, judging, making money, and living.”7 The aim of his lecture was to have his audience think about what it would mean for a professional teacher to become more integrated into the community—and to do this, it would mean “reminding himself that he is not only a teacher” so that “everybody else may be privileged to be a teacher,” and he does this by subverting the emphasis placed on “training.”8 Like his earlier essays on education that criticize the teachers colleges, this essay also laments the move to “child-centered” education. And similar to Arendt, Rosenstock-Huessy worries that to focus on the child is in fact not to educate him / her. It is not to see that the “new child” is born into an old world. He uses our change in vocabulary to illustrate his point. Although the vocabulary we use to name different objects changes—for example, from outhouse to toilet—this change simply demonstrates the movement of history. The child does not know the meaning of either outhouse or toilet; he or she has to be taught both things. The child—though new, though born into a generation that uses a toilet, still must be taught by parents. Children are not far ahead of their

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parents—and any distance is gained only by first being taught what the parents know. Like Arendt, Rosenstock-Huessy also worries that work has been exchanged for play and a teacher’s authority has been exchanged for camaraderie. The teacher, according to Rosenstock-Huessy, takes a child who is “prehistorical,” and lifts her into her own time: “Education puts a child who is out of time…up into the true stream of time of this generation.”9 Like Arendt, Rosenstock-Huessy also thinks that education should introduce the child to the world into which the child is born, not the world the child may develop. He argues that the child is in fact pre-modern, and must move through history in order to become modern. The great truth must be continued, and there must be “successors who speak with the same authority.”10 First we train, then we instruct, and then we teach. In Rosenstock-Huessy’s words, training will never reveal the truth of instruction and instruction can never explain teaching. But the higher can explain the lower. It is in teaching that we distinguish ourselves from brute animals—and from the brute animal in us. In the end, for RosenstockHuessy, teaching reveals to the child the role and responsibility that the child will assume upon becoming an adult. Thus, the most important task we have is to teach the teachers, and to teach children that they both will and must teach.11 It is here that we find both the point of intersection between Arendt and Rosenstock-Huessy, but also the roots of divergence. For both, the inequity that exists between teacher and student undermines any possibility of thinking of education as a political space, where equality between those who engage politically is a necessary component. Education, then, is necessarily conservative and any move to think otherwise is simply bad faith. (Theories of feminist pedagogy may be subject to this problem). In spite of their respective arguments, however, we are left with the following question regarding transition: How do children move from being taught about the world to sharing responsibility for that world? This goal of shared responsibility is a view that both Arendt and Rosenstock-Huessy hold. Arendt’s answer to this question is to “preserve the new and revolutionary in every child.”12 Each child brings hope for change, but, she argues, it is precisely this hope that motivates us to control the new so that we can dictate how it will look.”13 That is, in our efforts to educate for the sake of the political, or what we think the political should look like, we wind up destroying the future, rather than ensuring its possibilities. Our question then is the following: How are we to think of the relationship between the conservative education of children and the

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progressive, political activity of adults? If education is inherently conservative, if it is dangerous to the child’s development to have public spaces in school—or to make the school a public space, then how does one educate so that children can engage in public spaces as adults? I think one answer can be found in Rosenstock-Huessy’s earlier essays on education in which we find an implicit description of education as political—in Arendt’s sense of the term. My essay is less about answering the questions that I raised than it is about exploring the significance of them. Let me turn first to James’s essay.

William James and War In William James’s 1906 lecture at Stanford University and subsequently published essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” he argues that we, as a nation, need to find a way to become unified without the need of an external threat that serves this unifying function. He begins the lecture by exploring how deeply embedded in our psyche war is and how different our current relationship to war is from a relationship we had in ancient times. For the ancients, war was a way of life—cities were sacked; goods were stolen; and people [typically women] were taken and enslaved. Although we now believe—or many of us believe—that only when war is thrust upon us is it permissible, the memories of war are nonetheless part of our national psyche. As much as we believe we deplore war, we desire its memory. Yet in spite of the difference in attitudes between these two times in history, the cohesiveness that results from military training—and from the threat of an external enemy—connects the two time periods. James takes the militaristically minded to task for not being able to think of war as transitory, as a step in social evolution. Admitting his commitment to pacifism, James nonetheless acknowledges the “higher aspects of militaristic sentiment”—hardiness, commitment and readiness to serve, and the willingness to make sacrifices for the greater good.14 Yet, as a pacifist, James refuses to see that “war is, in short, a permanent human obligation.”15 He nonetheless concedes that if those opposed to the militaristic attitude do not provide a substitute, a “moral equivalent of war,” then they will not be able to touch the military minded.16 However, the moral equivalent of war is not simply that which we do in peacetime, but that which should redirect our sensibility so that we no longer need the external threat to unify us, to call us to service, and to acknowledge something larger than ourselves. He does not believe that “peace either ought to be or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states pacifically organized preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline.”17 He

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sees war dialectically whereby the very traits that give rise to war neither remain permanent nor are they annihilated; they are instead taken up into a higher order. War is removed but the human characteristics that make war possible remain: “Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built…”18 Inspired by James, Rosenstock-Huessy tells us in his 1942 essay, “Soldiers of the Impossible,” that “Everything important in the world must seem impossible before it is done and when we have classified it as possible it begins to be done badly and finally it is not done at all.19 Rosenstock-Huessy’s statement is a response to the manner in which we understand teaching. The essay, largely his position on teaching and the problem with the current state of education, reveals that the present method of producing teachers is in essence oxymoronic: we train teachers whose responsibility and talent should be precisely not to train. That is, we train teachers to be perfect, not to make mistakes, and, like a perfectly scripted Platonic dialogue, we expect them to know exactly what will be said before entering the classroom and then sticking to that script. He refers to a quote from Plato as cited by Aristotle that “Nothing important that I ever did can be found in my writing, it can only be found in the hour when we have been together in discussions, because the spark suddenly flared up and was over.”20 This essay is, for the most part, a lament about the teachers college. He criticizes departments of education and their mission to think of teaching as a craft, or something technical—something that itself can be taught. For Rosenstock-Huessy, teaching is about admitting that which is impossible and the only way for teaching to cross the border from impossible to possible is for teachers to love their subject matter—not simply love teaching, which has no object, no content. Teaching young children is not simply teaching young children—it is teaching math, reading, spelling, language, science, and so forth. He compares the classroom to a battleship and he tells teachers—including those at the teachers colleges—that they must have courage to make decisions for themselves. And this might mean recognizing that in the hour the teacher has with the student, one minute becomes more important than the other forty-nine (if one counts a fifty-minute hour). The classroom needs to be remodeled, Rosenstock-Huessy states, but it will never be done until we recognize that this one minute is more important than the other forty-nine. It is in that one minute that the forty-nine minutes of routine are disrupted, that spontaneity occurs, that we do not know what we will say, that teaching and learning happen. It is this hour—between the teacher and the

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student—when the student may not understand the point the teacher makes and the teacher does not know what to say, but listens to the student; it is this moment in which real teaching is found. Here we might say that this moment of speech is precisely the political that Arendt defines. In teaching, the new emerges. Thus, no matter how conservative or traditional the material, the new arises. And it is in this newness that education occurs. Teaching is facing the impossible; teachers are the soldiers of the impossible. In his essay, “A Classic and a Founder,” Rosenstock-Huessy provides a context for the consequences of facing the impossible: In the process of contacting the new environment, of undergoing the painful birthroes of becoming a definite character, we very soon become aware of our own limitations. The infinite power, the radiant certainty, leave us. The central choice [of] whom to marry, where to settle, what to do with our lives, these great decisions appear with the force of manifest destiny … a [person or an institution] that originated in genuine inspiration, will never give up under pressure from outside.21

Franz Rosenzweig, the twentieth-century century Jewish philosopher and long-time friend of Rosenstock Huessy, makes a similar point in his letter to Eduard Strauss, where he discusses the Lehrhaus—the place of adult Jewish education in Germany in the 1920s. He writes, …[d]esires are the messengers of confidence… For who knows whether desires such as these—real, spontaneous desires, not artificially nurtured by some scheme of education—can be satisfied? But those who know how to listen to real wishes may also know perhaps how to point out the desired way… For the teacher able to satisfy such spontaneous desires cannot be a teacher according to a plan; he must be much more and much less, a master and at the same time a pupil. It will not be enough that he himself knows or that he himself can teach. He must be capable of something quite different—he must be able to “desire.” He who can desire must be the teacher here. The teachers will be discovered in the same discussion room and the same discussion period as the students. And in the same discussion hour the same person may be heard as both master and student. In fact, only when this happens will it become certain that a person is qualified to teach.22

We see in both Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig a view of teaching that is similar, independent of the age group they are discussing. Education is described as transformative and it occurs in those fleeting moments in a classroom where listening to others and discussion with others takes place. For Rosenzweig, it is less important that the desire be

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satisfied than that we can meet at the seminar table and that we can desire in common with others.23 Although Rosenzweig’s interest was in adult Jewish education and thus the text at the seminar table is a Jewish text, I believe that the goal of the liberal arts in both kindergarten through high school, and in higher education is similar to Rosenzweig’s—to enflame the mind. This is an old story and one with which I am sure most of you are familiar. But indulge me, here. I am currently a faculty member in a large—very large—land-grant university. The position I had just previous to the one I hold currently was also at a very large land-grant university. I have always taught in the liberal arts. And while on the one hand, I resigned myself to my place in the land-grant university, the land grant actually had the foresight to promise much more than simply vocational training. The Morrill Act required that students be educated in the liberal arts—thus educating the whole person. That is, those who wrote the Morrill Act recognized that what would differentiate the experience one had in a land-grant university from simply becoming an experience in technical training was the education one also received in the liberal arts. We often hear the university describe itself in terms of a corporate model.24 Leaving aside for a moment the efficacy of such a description— especially in light of the most recent crises in the corporate world—the danger in describing itself this way is the implication that that the university sells or markets a product. On face value, this is not necessarily a problem. Students pay tuition and in exchange they receive the opportunity to pursue an education. But things are never only at face value. What is the product that the university is offering? Is it “an” education? Is it an opportunity to pursue an education? Is it a set of grades? Is it the diploma? Is it the promise of a job? I do not have time to examine each of these products, but I do want to make the point that I believe many students—and the parents of those students—have confused “pursuing an education” with “purchasing an education”—or worse, purchasing a diploma. The mission of the land-grant institution is really not much different from that of most state universities—land grant or not. Most state universities feel a connection to the community in which they live; they provide an education for teachers and nurses who might not otherwise be able to pursue that education; and they hope that those with that education might stay and contribute to their community. Thus all state universities can benefit from the philosophy behind the land-grant mission and the Morrill Act that informs it. In order for everyone to have equal access to an education, the liberal arts were part of the fundamental education

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provided by the land-grant universities. It is the liberal arts that kept the land-grant universities from becoming technical colleges, which would simply reinscribe class, sex, and geographic restrictions that kept many people from pursuing an education elsewhere. In spite of arguments to the contrary, the liberal arts transcend political categories. For example, self–identifying conservatives might fight to keep feminist literature out of the canon, but one does not need feminist literature to help students see the question of women’s education, women’s nature, equality, and so forth. With this in mind, one does not need “boutique” studies—so pejoratively named by Allan Bloom, to be controversial or to raise controversial questions or topics in the classroom. With good books, these questions emerge naturally—and the key is for the teacher to allow them to emerge and address these questions as they arise. In a recent conversation, one of my former graduate students told me that in her class on social thought last year she raised the dreaded “woman” question with regard to Aristotle’s Politics. Another student in the class, clearly frustrated by her question, said in response, “I don’t want to talk about women; I want to talk about slavery.” My graduate student replied, “Who do you think the slaves were?” In other words, what my graduate student realized and this other student did not realize was that slavery in the Greek polis was the function a certain kind of economic system and dependence on the household. One cannot talk about slavery without talking about women, even if Aristotle does not mention them as such. Rather than pointing to a narrow, left-wing interest, my student’s question reflected a broader understanding of Greek culture that needed to be addressed. My point is not that feminist literature, African-American literature, Latino / Latina or Hispanic literature, and so on are unnecessary; to the contrary, my point is that the topics raised by these area studies cannot be ignored even in a reading list such as the Great Books lists found at St. John’s College or the University of Chicago. That is, even a conservative educational agenda regarding the liberal arts cannot avoid controversy or discomfort. It cannot avoid the moment of transformation; it cannot avoid the novel or the spontaneous. And thus regardless of what we include or exclude from the canon, education is itself political. With that said, I should add that I am also an old-fashioned liberal— and while I believe in the inherent value of the liberal arts, I also believe that the transformation that comes with this education is for a purpose. Let me then turn to the legacy of Camp William James to illustrate my point.

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The Legacy of Camp William James Overwhelmed by James’ speech, and feeling the call to respond to it, Rosenstock-Huessy begins Camp William James, a training camp for future leaders who will learn how to ensure the future by giving of themselves to others. Camp William James was linked to the Civilian Conservation Corps, however it differed in one crucial respect. Unlike the CCC jobs, which afforded work possibilities for those unlikely to get work in other places, Camp William James had a mixed population, which included young men from Ivy League schools—those who did not need the New Deal benefits of the CCC. Rosenstock-Huessy took James seriously and saw that service to the nation was not only for the benefit of providing opportunities for work, but also served the function of transforming those who engaged in volunteer service. Unfortunately, with the outbreak of World War II, Camp William James survived for only two years. Yet, its legacy was extraordinary. There is a legacy to Camp William James that remains hidden. Page Smith, probably the Camp’s most famous student, developed Cowell College at the University of California at Santa Cruz; he helped found the Penny University and the William James Association. Many trace the development of the Peace Corps directly to it, when Smith sent a letter to Sen. Hubert Humphrey, who then contacted President John F. Kennedy. All of Smith’s projects and activities bear the mark that Camp William James left on him—to put thought into action and service to others. Rosenstock-Huessy developed Camp William James, which offered the momentary vision of this possibility—where ordinary people could offer tremendous service by working, for example, on local farms, by being leaders in the community and thereby teaching others by modeling service. His development of Camp William James recognized not only the need for leadership but also the need for providing the opportunity to engage in it—to educate leaders. However, these volunteers were collegeage students, and their volunteer work was outside the college classroom. We are still left, then, with the question of transition. If schools are not treated as public spaces, and I am sympathetic to Arendt’s argument against this treatment, then how we preserve the new and how we educate in order to encourage political action remain a mystery—and political action resembles something just short of a miracle. I am not sure I can answer this question here, even though my primary purpose has been to illuminate the question. There are so many directions one can take—for example, interfacing both Arendt and Rosenstock-Huessy with Dewey. But it might also mean re-thinking what education is, and what it means to

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practice political action in order to find a way for them to co-exist, even if education is not itself to be political. Although Camp William James was short-lived, its legacy is found in the many places where national service is emphasized. We see it in President Kennedy’s inaugural speech where he calls all Americans to a life of service, and which anticipates the development and the promise of the Peace Corps: …In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than in mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe. Now the trumpet summons us again--not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, “rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation”—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself. Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance, North and South, East and West, that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind? Will you join in that historic effort? In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it—and the glow from that fire can truly light the world. And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man. Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.25

There are, however, skeptics to this view. Responding to a Time magazine article on the environment, Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online editor-at-large, argues (April 25, 2008) that there is no such thing as a “moral equivalent of war.” Failing to understand James’ essay, Goldberg claims that such an “equivalent” is “fundamentally authoritarian”

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and thereby undemocratic.26 He ends his short essay with the following rhetoric: “For some reason it seems the moral equivalent of war requires the moral equivalent of a police state.” I sympathize with Goldberg’s worry. There is, after all, some of this moral bullying in, on the one hand, the neo-fascism of the mushrooming trend at numerous home owners’ associations (the trashcan and weed police), and on the other, poorly designed programs in “character education” and the self-righteousness with regard to the environment. However, Goldberg, I would argue, misses the point. James’ argument, which Rosenstock-Huessy uses, is not that we need to create a militaristic mentality; that mentality is already in place. Rather we need to redirect the need or even desire for unity—which drives the militaristic mentality— into service to the nation, and into building, rather than destroying. Rosenstock-Huessy’s view was that we needed leaders to help with the farms—not only for the farmers but also for the future of the nation itself. In the same way that we think of war, ironically, as securing our future (if we do not destroy ourselves in the process), Rosenstock-Huessy, following James, believed that we can better secure our future by helping others secure their present. As we see in Rosenstock-Huessy’s comments with regard to Camp William James and his remarks on teaching—and as we see in the remarks about the Peace Corps—real service to others enacts a transformation of the self. This is not to diminish the sacrifice that is made to help others, but to dispute the claim that service—any service—is completely selfless. The transformation of the self and the benefits to the self are a fundamental part of service to others. And yet although the benefits to the self are many, both James and Rosenstock-Huessy believed that this service should be voluntary. For James, we needed to redirect our thinking from the view that the military—and war—is the only, or necessary, mechanism to creating a unified nation to the view that service to others inside our communities could accomplish this unification better. It is, however, difficult then to take Jonah Goldberg’s comments seriously as we continue to engage in a protracted war, where soldiers have been deployed—and redeployed, in violation of their contract, as a recession continues and becomes more serious everyday, making necessities, much less luxuries, prohibitively expensive for all, and as concerns about the environment and global warming increase. In light of this current crisis, we can recall Jimmy Carter’s 1977 televised speech, outlining his proposed energy policy, thirty years prior to Goldberg’s commentary:

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Chapter Eighteen Tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you about a problem unprecedented in our history. With the exception of preventing war, this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes. The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but it will if we do not act quickly. It is a problem we will not solve in the next few years, and it is likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century. We must not be selfish or timid if we hope to have a decent world for our children and grandchildren. We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now, we can control our future instead of letting the future control us. Two days from now, I will present my energy proposals to the Congress. Its members will be my partners and they have already given me a great deal of valuable advice. Many of these proposals will be unpopular. Some will cause you to put up with inconveniences and to make sacrifices. The most important thing about these proposals is that the alternative may be a national catastrophe. Further delay can affect our strength and our power as a nation. Our decision about energy will test the character of the American people and the ability of the President and the Congress to govern. This difficult effort will be the “moral equivalent of war”—except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not destroy.27

Carter was labeled “the doom and gloom” president—the one who told it like it is. As it turned out, telling it like it is, contrary to what the public claims, appears to be not really what the public wants from the president. But in spite of what we wanted to hear, Carter’s Cassandrian prediction came to pass. It is hard not to wonder if we had heeded his advice thirty years ago and unified, whether we might well have positioned ourselves better to avoid our most recent energy crisis.28 I would argue, then, in opposition to Arendt, that we can find in the educational experience—as described by Rosenstock-Huessy—the roots of the political; education does not simply make the new possible, but is itself the emergence of the new. Contrary to Arendt’s claim that education is inherently conservative, we can find in Rosenstock-Huessy a view that that education is inherently political and progressive. Although we may teach material and ideas that are traditional, the possibility of the new not only is present, but it actually defines the moment in which education happens. Camp William James was a means to supplement the educational experience at Dartmouth, an experience like the one that large universities are able to offer. I think we can see the legacy of Camp William James in Teach for America—where leadership becomes service, and those who might not

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have seen themselves as teachers become teachers in order to serve the nation, where the need for education becomes for some the moral equivalent of war—again pulling from Ivy league colleges (which were once the training grounds for leaders). And I would argue that can we see this legacy in the most recent inaugural speech in which Barack Obama calls us to service and to responsibility. Like Kennedy’s, Obama’s speech reminds us that we are citizens of the world and that what is required of us now is a new era of responsibility—a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world; duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task. This is the price and the promise of citizenship.29

Education, and in particular higher education, must take its cue from this speech. The return to an emphasis on responsibility reinvigorates the question of theory and practice. We need to cultivate creative minds that can solve difficult and complex problems—but just as we need to inflame the mind, we also need to inflame the desire for service. I cannot help but end with this small observation. On Memorial Day 2008, the front page of my local newspaper ran two front-page stories—to the left, a story commemorating the soldiers who have given their lives in current and previous wars. To the right, in larger type, an article about the rising cost of oil and its global impact. Buried somewhere inside the paper was an article on the status of the Texas schools’ latest test scores. The irony—the two front-page stories, side by side, in addition to the story on education buried somewhere inside the paper—is not difficult to see nor is it difficult to wonder what might have been if James’s legacy—the translation of thought into action, the call to train more soldiers at Camp William James, and the discovery that we all must teach as a way to serve our country—continued to have been realized. Claire Katz is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies, Texas A & M University, College Station, Texas, USA.

CHAPTER NINETEEN CHRISTIAN, MUSLIM, JEW FRANZ ROSENZWEIG AND THE ABRAHAMIC RELIGIONS

(2007) SPENGLER COPYRIGHT © 2007, FIRST THINGS (OCTOBER) REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION

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RANZ ROSENZWEIG IS WIDELY REGARDED as one of the greatest Jewish theologians of the past century. Best known for The Star of Redemption, published eight years before his death in 1929 at the age of forty-three, he began a new kind of dialogue between Judaism and Christianity when he argued that the two faiths complement each other: Christianity to propagate revelation to the world, and Judaism to “convert the inner pagan” inside each Christian. Less often mentioned, however, is Rosenzweig’s analysis of Islam, a religion he regarded as a throwback to paganism. Indeed, Rosenzweig predicted a prolonged conflict of civilizations between Islam and the West. The coming millennium will go down in world history as a struggle between Orient and Occident, between the church and Islam, between the Germanic peoples and the Arabs; he forecast in 1920—in part because Islam is “a parody of revealed religion,” while Allah is an apotheosized despot, “the colorfully contending gods of the pagan pantheon rolled up into one.” Rather than three Abrahamic religions, Rosenzweig saw only two religions arising from the self-revelation of divine love, with Islam as a crypto-pagan pretender. He was no Islamophobe, observing that Islam during certain eras evinced greater tolerance and humaneness than Christian Europe. But he was emphatic that truly foundational differences distinguish Judeo-Christian religion from Islam. Contemporary academic thinkers almost universally eschew Rosenzweig’s view of Islam. But it makes no sense to affirm Rosenzweig’s depiction of the unique bond between Jews and Christians, their response to God’s self-revelation through love, while ignoring what makes this

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bond so different from other human responses to the transcendent. In Rosenzweig’s theology, the soul’s awareness of God begins with his love, and from this arise both faith and authentic human individuality. The existential condition of being loved is what uniquely characterizes Christian and Jew, as opposed to the pagan, for whom God must remain hidden. At first glance, Rosenzweig’s characterization of Islam as pagan appears strange, for we habitually classify religions according to their outward forms and identify paganism with manifestations of polytheism or nature worship. Insisting on the uniqueness of Allah and suppressing outward expressions of idolatry, Islam appears the opposite of a pagan religion. Rosenzweig, however, requires us to see faith from the existential standpoint of the believer, who in revealed religion knows God through God’s love. For Rosenzweig, paganism constitutes a form of alienation from the revealed God of Love; Allah, the absolutely transcendent God who offers mercy but not unconditional love, is therefore a pagan deity. All humankind acknowledges the divine, Rosenzweig insists in The Star of Redemption, because humans are mortal. From the fear of death arises the perception of the transcendent; and, in the pursuit of eternal life, one proceeds to life, as he avers in the book’s final words. The path to human life, however, requires a life outside time; that is, in the Kingdom of Heaven. Man cannot abide his mortal existence and the terror of death without the prospect of eternal life. Rosenzweig’s existential theology looks through the patina of received doctrine to the spiritual life of the congregation and its attempt to create for itself a life beyond the grave. How different faiths, different modes of living, address the fear of death creates a unique vantage point from which to understand how profoundly Christianity, Judaism, and Islam differ from one another. Rosenzweig’s existential theology is embedded in what he calls a sociology of religion. He considers not only the individual’s response to the fear of death but also, and more important, the response of entire peoples to the threat of extinction. It is not only our own death that we fear under some circumstances we may not fear it at all; but rather the death of our race, our culture, our language, and with them the death of the possibility that some trace of our presence on earth will persist through our successors. Perhaps Rosenzweig’s most influential claim holds that the Jew “converts the inner pagan” inside the Christian, such that the living presence of the Jewish people creates a counterweight to the Gnostic impulses in Christianity. “Before God stand both of us,” he wrote:

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Jew and Christians, laborers at the same task. It is only the Old Testament that enables Christianity to defend itself against [Gnosticism], its inherent danger. And it is the Old Testament alone, because it is more than just a book. The arts of allegorical interpretation would have made short work of a mere book. If, like Christ, the Jews had disappeared from the world, they would denote only the Idea of a People, and Zion the Idea of the midpoint of the world, just as Christ denotes only the Idea of Man. But the sturdy and undeniable vitality of the Jewish people, to which anti-Semitism itself attests, opposes itself to such idealization. That Christ is more than idea, no Christian can know this. But that Israel is more than an idea, the Christian knows, because he sees it. ... Our presence stands surety for their truth. [All translations from Rosenzweig are my own.]

In the post-Holocaust world, after neopaganism nearly conquered Europe, Rosenzweig’s contention that Christianity requires the presence of the Jews found great resonance. Yet his formulation stems from a theological sociology with broader application. Pagans, Rosenzweig explained, have only the fragile and ultimately futile effort to preserve their physical continuity through blood and soil. Their hope for immortality takes the form of a perpetual fight for physical existence, which one day they must lose. Rosenzweig’s sociology of religion thus offers unique insights into the origin and nature of civilizational conflict when he argues that a pagan people, ever sentient of the fragility of their existence, are always prepared to fight to the death. It is hard to dismiss Rosenzweig’s view of Islam as an expression of Jewish prejudice, for he also rejected Zionism and celebrated the virtues of a Judaism removed from the temporal constraints of nationhood. He formed his view of Islam during the First World War as a German soldier (and an ally of Muslim Turkey), long before Arab-Jewish conflict was a concern to most Jews. Indeed, Jews of Rosenzweig’s generation tended to view Islam as more hospitable to Judaism than Christianity. Like Martin Buber, with whom he translated the Hebrew Scriptures into German, Rosenzweig remains a rallying point for non-Zionist Jewish universalism, attracting the sorts of admirers who most desire reconciliation between the State of Israel and its Muslim adversaries. By the same token, the embrace of Zionism by all mainstream Jewish currents after 1948 makes Rosenzweig something of an anomaly to Jewish thought today. Still, it is misguided to dismiss Rosenzweig’s analysis of Islam as a matter of secondary interest, for he stated plainly that his critique of Islam was quite as important to his thought as his presentation of Judaism. In his essay, “The New Thinking,” he wrote that The Star of Redemption is not a “‘Jewish book,’ at all. ... It does deal with Judaism, but not any more

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exhaustively than with Christianity and barely more exhaustively than Islam.” Nonetheless, the Rosenzweig scholars who bother to address the issue tend to dismiss his discussion of Islam as “troublesome” or as “an embarrassing prejudice.” Only one extant monograph addresses Rosenzweig’s analysis of Islam in depth: a German-language collection of his writings with introductory essays by Gesine Palmer and Yossef Schwartz, in which Schwartz claims that Rosenzweig wasn’t really writing about Islam at all but rather about a Hegelian construct that Rosenzweig confounded with Islam. That seems an odd assertion, considering that Rosenzweig formed his view of Islam in part through direct contact with Muslims in Macedonia during the war, and he wrote about his experience in a letter reproduced in Palmer and Schwartz’s own volume. None of these scholars address the definitive aspect of Rosenzweig’s analysis, what he called the “sociological basis” of religion. Although most of Rosenzweig’s comments about Islam are found in book two of The Star of Redemption, it is book three, his portrayal of the encounter of the peoples with mortality, that establishes the context, for it is there that he explains the “pagan world of fate and chance,” which applies to paganism’s manifestation in Islam. Although Palmer and Schwartz have collected every passage that mentions the word Islam in Rosenzweig’s work, they exclude his striking portrayal of pagan society. In short, they excise the context in which to understand his assertion that Islam is a mode of paganism. Early in The Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig argues that pagan society cannot foster authentic human individuality but dissolves the individual into an extension of race or state. “For the isolated individual, his society is the society,” he writes: In the thoroughly organized State, the State and the individual do not stand in the relation of a whole to a part. Instead, the state is the All, from which the power flows through the limbs of the individual. Everyone has his determined place, and, to the extent that he fulfills it, belongs to the All of the State. ... The individual of antiquity does not lose himself in society in order to find himself, but rather in order to construct it; he himself disappears. The well-known difference between the ancient and all modern concepts of democracy rightly arise from this. It is clear from this why antiquity never developed the concept of representative democracy. Only a body can have organs; a building has only parts.

Written before the consolidation of communist power in Russia or the creation of the European fascist state, this passage was prescient, for it

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characterizes the modern neopagan state as well as the heathen societies of antiquity. It is also the starting point for Rosenzweig’s characterization of Islam as pagan and Allah as an apotheosized despot. He begins, in other words, with a general characterization of pagan society as a “thoroughly organized¨ society in the absence of God’s self-revelation through love, and then he considers Islam as a specific case of a paganism that parodies the outward form of revealed religion. “In an authentic confession of faith,” he argues, there always is this testimony, namely that one’s personal experience of love must be more than the experience of just one individual; that He whom the soul experiences in its love cannot be simply an illusion or a self-deception of the beloved soul, but that He actually lives.

And so God achieves through the witness of the believing soul a tangible and visible reality beyond Hiddenness, beyond his Hiddenness, which he possessed in a different way in heathendom.

By the same logic, Islam’s confession of faith cannot be a confession of faith at all: Islam’s confession, “God is God,” is no confession of faith, but a confession of non-faith (ein Unglaubensbekenntnis). It confesses in this tautology not a revealed God, but a hidden one. Nicholas of Cusa says rightly that a heathen, indeed an atheist, could profess the same.

Revelation, according to Rosenzweig, occurs through the soul’s awareness of God’s love, and human individuality arises from the soul’s response to being loved. In pagan society, where God remains unrevealed, the individual exists only as an organ of the collective of state or race. The pagan’s sense of immortality therefore depends solely on the perpetuation of his race, and his most sacred act is to sacrifice himself in war to postpone the inevitable day when his race will go down in defeat. Rosenzweig’s spiritual characterization of pagan society is the starting point for his sociology of religion: an understanding of the response of whole peoples to mortality and transcendence. Uniquely among the peoples of the world, the Jews believe that a covenant with the Creator of Heaven and Earth makes them an eternal people. Not so the Gentiles, Rosenzweig writes:

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Just as every individual must reckon with his eventual death, the peoples of the world foresee their eventual extinction, be it however distant in time. Indeed, the love of the peoples for their own nationhood is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death. Love is only surpassing sweet when it is directed toward a mortal object, and the secret of this ultimate sweetness only is defined by the bitterness of death. Thus the peoples of the world foresee a time when their land with its rivers and mountains still lies under heaven as it does today, but other people dwell there; when their language is entombed in books, and their laws and customers have lost their living power.

He adds: Because it trusts only in its self-created eternity and upon nothing else in the world, [the Jewish people] really believes in its eternity, while the peoples of the world in the final analysis reckon with their own death, just as does the individual, at some point, be it ever so remote.

And further: War as it was known to the peoples of antiquity was in general only one of the natural expressions of life, and presented no fundamental complications. War meant that a people staked its life, for the sake of its life. A people that marched to war took upon itself the danger of its own death. That mattered little as long as the peoples regarded themselves as mortal.

Islam, Rosenzweig continues, transforms the defense of the homeland into an offensive against the prospective enemies of the homeland, such that Europe had to defend itself against the “encroaching heathenism of the half-moon.” Military incursions, to be sure, are not the likeliest form of attack on traditional society in the twenty-first century; the infiltration of popular culture and the encroachment of the global marketplace pose an existential threat to some traditional societies as dire as conquering hordes. It is against such new threats to pagan culture that Islam spills the blood of its sons on the soil of their homelands today. For Rosenzweig, holy war is the sine qua non of Islam, precisely because war is the most sacred act of pagan society in general. As he writes: The concept of the Path of Allah is entirely different from God’s path. The paths of God are the disposition of divine decrees high above human events. But following the path of Allah means in the narrowest sense propagating Islam through holy war. In the obedient journey upon this

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path, taking upon one’s self the associated dangers, the observance of the laws prescribed for it, Muslim piety finds its way in the world. The path of Allah is not elevated above the path of humankind, as far as the heaven stretches above earth, but rather the path of Allah means immediately the path of his believers. For this reason, God’s special love for the weak and defenseless that characterizes the God of Jews and Christians is inconceivable in Islam: Unlike the God of faith, Allah cannot go before his own [people] and say to their face that he has chosen them above all others in all their sinfulness, and in order to make them accountable for their sins. That the failings of human beings arouse divine love more powerfully than their merits is an impossible, indeed an absurd thought to Islam, but it is the thought that stands at the heart of [Jewish and Christian] faith.

Franz Rosenzweig was quite prepared to believe that Islam was more humane and tolerant than Christianity during some of its history. But that historical fact remains beside Rosenzweig’s point, for he sees Islam as the path of obedience: The path of Allah requires the obedience of the will to a commandment that has been given once and for all time. By contrast, in [Judeo-Christian] brotherly love, the spore of human character erupts ever anew, incited by the ever-surprising outbreak of the act of love.

Traditional peoples fight to the death, even in the knowledge that one day they must lose their existential fight for existence. The pagan’s personality is an extension of race and state, in Rosenzweig’s view; therefore, it dies with the death of his society. He risks nothing by sacrificing his life to preserve his society. Rosenzweig’s sociology helps us to make sense of contemporary conflicts. Rarely if ever in recorded history has suicide played the central role in military conflict that it does today in the Islamic world. The explanation for self-destructive behavior on a grand scale is that the spiritual death ensuing from the dissolution of traditional society bears with it greater fear than the fear of physical death. The scholar Gil Anidjar complains that “Islam simply disappears from Rosenzweig’s argument¨ in book three of The Star of Redemption, the sociological section that portrays Jews and Christians in their striving for eternal life. In fact, the third book contains Rosenzweig’s definitive characterization of Islamic life. The Christian and Jewish liturgical years, he explains, recapitulate a journey to redemption. His chapter on Jewish life begins with the blessing recited multiple times during the reading of the Torah at the Sabbath service: “Blessed be He who planted eternal life among us.” That introduces Rosenzweig’s elaboration of the Jewish idea of eternity in the physical continuity of an eternal people. The Sabbath is

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the foundation of Jewish life, the day on which the Jew eschews earthly endeavor and enjoys as it were a foretaste of the Kingdom of Heaven: “In the circle of weekly sections, which annually run through the entire Torah, the spiritual year is traversed, and the steps of this course are the Sabbaths.” Judaism for Rosenzweig is a self-sustaining eternal fire, nourished by the physical continuity of the Jewish people. Christianity is a perpetual journey toward salvation, directing these rays outward. The lives of Christian and Jewish communities, as experienced through the liturgical calendar, express the world’s own journey toward redemption. Yet Islam lives in the perpetual present of prehistory: Islam also makes the world in its individuality into an object of redemption. The path of Allah leads his believers into the real peoples of real epochs in time. But how does it think of these peoples and epochs? In the [Judeo-Christian] Kingdom they come forward in a continuous, if incalculable, augmentation of life. ... In Islam, by contrast, all worldly individuality stands under the sign of prehistory, that is, negation. It is always new, and never something that develops gradually. Here every epoch in time stands in immediate relation to God, and not merely every epoch, but all individuality in general. ... Historical epochs therefore are placed in no relation whatever to each other; there is no growth from one to the other, no “Spirit” that goes through all of them and unifies them. In the case of Islam, Rosenzweig concludes, “the concept of the future is poisoned at its root.¨ Only through the action of God in history, through the growth of the kingdom in contrasting epochs, he argues, is it possible to recognize the “gift of eternity” in the present moment. Sacred time, the content of the Jewish and Christian liturgical calendars, does not exist in Islam, Rosenzweig concludes in his “last comparative glance” at Islam in book three. Rosenzweig’s treatment of the response of peoples to the prospect of national mortality constitutes one of his most original contributions, informing his understanding of paganism in general and Islam in particular. “The God of Mohammed,” he writes, … is a creator who well might not have bothered to create. He displays his power like an Oriental potentate who rules by violence, not by acting according to necessity, not by authorizing the enactment of the law, but rather in his freedom to act arbitrarily. By contrast, it is most characteristic of rabbinic theology that it formulates our concept of the divine power to create in the question as to whether God created the world out of love or out of righteousness.

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Allah’s creation is, for Rosenzweig, a mere act of “magic.” Muslim theology presumes that Allah creates every isolated thing at every moment. Providence thus is shattered into infinitely many individual acts of creation, with no connection to each other, each of which has the importance of the entire creation. That has been the doctrine of the ruling orthodox philosophy in Islam. Every individual thing is created from scratch at every moment. Islam cannot be salvaged from this frightful providence of Allah.

With his mention of “orthodox philosophy in Islam,” Rosenzweig is referring to the eleventh-century normative theology of al-Ghazali, still recognized as the preeminent Muslim theologian. Rosenzweig’s objections to al-Ghazali are rooted in the critiques made by Maimonides and St. Thomas Aquinas. In fact, there is a striking parallel between Rosenzweig’s restatement of the medieval critique and Pope Benedict XVI’s discussion of Muslim theology at Regensburg on September 12, 2006. As all the world now knows, after riots and protests broke out across the world, Benedict quoted the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologue: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” The pope continued: The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. “God,” he says, “is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature.” …

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: Not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. The editor [of the Greek text from which Benedict is quoting], Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.

Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazm went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry.

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What are we to make of this? Benedict went on to insist that God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf.

And this, indeed, suggests that Rosenzweig’s existential theology, which proceeds from the soul’s experience of love in God’s selfrevelation, can find its way back to agreement with the medieval Christian and Jewish refutation of al-Ghazali. Rosenzweig’s analysis of foundational differences between JudeoChristian religion and Islam holds more than historical interest for us today. The challenges of theological dialogue with Islam noted by Benedict XVI among others should alert us that an existential divide separates the Judeo-Christian West and Islam. Rosenzweig is provocative, perhaps even disturbing, in his treatment of Islam. But it seems unlikely that we will make sense of the civilizational debate with Islam without grappling with the issues that he raised almost a century ago. Spengler is a pseudonymous essayist for the Asia Times Online.

NOTES CHAPTER ONE: THE END OF THE WORLD, OR WHEN THEOLOGY SLEPT (EUGEN ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY) 1

Editor’s note. While he was a student at Harvard University studying with Rosenstock-Huessy’s friend and admirer, Alfred North Whitehead, George Allen Morgan met Rosenstock-Huessy. He assisted Rosenstock-Huessy in preparing The Christian Future, or the Modern Mind Outrun (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1946), which is, in part, a response to the challenge of Morgan’s Nietzschean interests. Morgan fought in World War II, and went on to work in the U.S. State Department. As a member of The Psychological Strategy Board, he was a contributor to the framing of U.S. Cold War policy. He was also the first Secretary to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, and author of the paper, “Stalin on Revolution,” Foreign Affairs, XXVII (January 1949), published under the pseudonym Historicus. In retirement, and after Rosenstock-Huessy’s death, he wrote Speech and Society: The Christian Linguistic Social Philosophy of Eugen RosenstockHuessy (Gainesville, Fla.: University of Florida Press, 1987), containing a collection of citations by Rosenstock-Huessy. See also George Allen Morgan, What Nietzsche Means (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1941).-WC 2 Editor’s note. The original typescript contained the expression: have to do repentance.-FH 3 For the failure of historians to grapple with an eschatological term like Vicar of Christ, the reader finds evidence in my Out of Revolution, Autobiography of Western Man (New York: William Morrow, 1938), 552 ff. 4 Gérard M.Paré, A. Brunet, and P. Tremblay, La Renaissance du XIIe siècle: Les écoles et l’enseignement (Paris and Ottawa: Publications de l’Institute d’études médiévales d’Ottawa, 1933), 307 ff. 5 Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, 59-237. 6 Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, 5. 7 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Die Apokalypse der deutschen Seele; Studien zu einer Lehre von letzten Haltungen, vol. II. (Leipzig: 1939), 379. 8 Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, 241-373. 9 Urs von Balthasar, Die Apokalypse der deutschen Seele. On the Cross of Reality, see my Soziologie I (Berlin: Walter deGruyter, 1925); Adolf Meyer-Abich, “Ideen und Ideale der biologischen Erkenntnis, Beiträge zur Theorie und Geschichte der biologischen Ideologien. Bios-Serien, 1 (Ideas and ideals of biological knowledge. Contributions to the theory and history of biological ideologies. Life Series, vol. 1) (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1934). 10 Editor’s note. The original typescript used the words: procrastinate decay.-FH 11 Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, 186ff., 309ff. 12 The propagandist does not know that speech changes the speaker himself, too.

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CHAPTER TWO: HÖLDERLIN AND NIETZSCHE (EUGEN ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY) 1

Editor’s note. Crane Brinton, Nietzsche (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1941). To put it mildly, there was no love lost between Brinton and Rosenstock-Huessy. Brinton was only too glad to be rid of Rosenstock-Huessy when he left Harvard. Brinton and Rosenstock-Huessy were as different intellectually as it is possible to be. Both had reviewed and canned each other’s books on revolutions.-WC 2 Editor’s translation. “To love means to spare someone shame.”-WC 3 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Die verklappte Heilige,” item 31 in Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (Leipzig: Verlag von E. W. Fritsch, 1887 2nd ed.; originally published 1882). 4 Editor’s translation. Too deeply, the clouds settle in. around me / I wait upon the next lightning strike.-WC 5 Editor’s note. The original typescript contains the incorrect name (Grover Whalew) for Grover Whalen, a public relations manager and the president of the New York World Fair Corporation. A former police chief, he presided over the 1939 New York World’s Fair.-FH 6 Editor’s note. The original typescript contains the incorrect date and title, 1875 and Die Zukunftsphilosophie des Herrn N.-FH 7 Editor’s note. The original typescript from the handwritten notes contained numerous abbreviations for names, such as “mistaking the greatest thinker N., the greatest historian, B. …” etc. I have spelled out the abbreviations in the running text for ease of reading.-FH 8 Editor’s note. The original typescript from handwritten notes contains this notation: “Both can’t be alive, I or see (= Ich oder sie: they?).” The cited “Zwar ich leide” (To be sure, I suffer) comes from “Yorick als Zigeuner,” perhaps written in St. Moritz, where Nietzsche wrote many of his great works. The preceding lines and context to “Zwar ich leide” are: … Sterben? Sterben kann ich nicht! Bettler ihr! Denn euch zum Neide, ward mir, was ihr - nie erwerbt: Zwar ich leide, zwar ich leide – Aber ihr - ihr sterbt, ihr sterbt! auch nach hundert Todesgängen Bin ich Atem, Dunst und Licht – Unnütz, unnütz, mich zu hängen! Sterben? Sterben kann ich nicht! -FH 9 Editor’s translation. “Once I lived as the gods, and no more is required.”-WC 10 Editors’ note. This is a reference to what has been cited as the expanded “speech letter” of Rosenstock-Huessy to Franz Rosenzweig. Eugen RosenstockHuessy, Angewandte Seelenkunde: Eine programmatische Übersetzung

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(Darmstadt: Röther-Verlag, 1924; Practical Knowledge of the Soul, trans. Mark Huessy and Freya von Moltke (Norwich, Vt.: Argo Books, 1988) 11 Editor’s translation. “My soul, a stringed instrument, sang its song to itself; was anybody listening to her?” From Friedrich Nietzsche, “Warum ich so klug bin,” Ecce Homo (1908). See Rosenstock-Huessy’s “Raumnot” chapter from his Soziologie I, for a different translation and context of this passage.-WC CHAPTER THREE: NIETZSCHE’S UNTIMELINESS (EUGEN ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY) 1

Editor’s note. According to Lise van der Molen, the text for this intended footnote was left blank. Mr. van der Molen believes Rosenstock-Huessy meant to insert the line: Um Mittag war’s, da wurde Eins zu Zwei… (It was around noon; look—One turned into Two.) From Friedrich Nietzsche, “Aus hohen Bergen (Nachgesang),” in Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886).-FH 2 Editor’s note. In this instance and in several others, the word triunity has been typed over, as if to reflect some confusion about whether the word is trinity or triunity. Because of the subsequent, unmistakable use of triunity, I have made each instance of this word conform to that use. Further, the meaning of triunity appears to be a better linguistic fit than trinity in each instance.-FH 3 Editor’s note. The first reflexive pronoun used to stand in for soul was itself; the second use was herself. I have made the use of the pronoun consistent, to avoid confusion.-FH 4 “Das ist ja das Grosse, dass es Götter gibt aber nicht Gott.” CHAPTER FOUR: THE PERILS OF INTELLECTUAL SPACES (EUGEN ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY) 1

Editors' note. Throughout this essay, Rosenstock-Huessy uses Standpunkt in ways that differentiate vantages points, perspectives, and standpoints from the concepts inherent in the time-sensitive Zeitpunkt. In keeping with the original text, we are retaining “standpoint” as the translation for Standpunkt. Rosenstock-Huessy did not use synonyms for Standpunkt in this essay, perhaps as a way of keeping the distinction between Standpunkt and Zeitpunkt intact and consistent. 2 Editor’s note. The original running text notes a reference, but provides very little information. It is most likely from René Descartes, Correspondance V. ed. Charles Adam and Gérard Milhaud (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951), 279. -FH 3 Editor's note. The reference in the original running text is to Peter Yorck von Wartenburg's Letters to [Wilhelm] Dilthey, 1923, p. 68. Fragments of these letters

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can be found throughout Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. No other publication information specific to the Letters can be found.-FH 4 Descartes, Correspondance V, 322ff: “Ame et Corps” and “Corps et Pensée” alternate four times. 5 Editor’s note. Willy Hellpach (1877-1955), physician and psychologist, sixth president of the State of Baden, Germany, and a member of the German Democratic Party (DDP), a liberal party disparagingly characterized as the party of “Jews and professors.”-FH 6 Editor’s note. The actual quotation is misreported in Rosenstock-Huessy; as published, the letter to Overbeck, written New Year’s Eve 1882, reads: “Ich bin nun einmal nicht Geißt, und nicht Körper, sondern etwas Drittes.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Briefwechsel mit Franz Overbeck (Leipzig: Im Insel Verlag, 1916), 187.-FH 7 Letter to his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, mid-March 1885. 8 Editor's note. The quotation is incorrect in Rosenstock-Huessy’s original essay. The poem, “Venedig,” reads: Meine Seele, ein Saitenspiel, Sang sich, unsichtbar berührt, Heimlich ein Gondellied dazu, Zitternd vor bunter Seligkeit. Hörte jemand ihr zu? ... -FH 9 Editor's note. This name refers to the poem by Nietzsche in The Gay Science. Literally the poem’s title can be translated as “Prince Freebird.” The poem itself refers to Nietzsche’s own solitude and perils. The title of the poem is based on a Medieval political / legal term. For someone to be classified as Vogelfrei in the Middle Ages basically meant a bounty had been issued on the person, and anyone could kill the Vogelfrei with impunity.-WC 10 To Peter Gast, September 3, 1883. 11 From the introduction to Paul Valéry, Les plus belles pages de Descartes. 12 Editor's note. This is a translation of the quotation appearing in RosenstockHuessy's original text, “Lieben heißt, jemandem eine Scham ersparen.” The actual quotation from Nietzsche comes from The Gay Science (Book III, item 274): Was ist dir das menschlichste? Jemandem Scham ersparen. “What do you consider most humane? To spare someone shame.”-FH 13 Editor’s note. In a letter to Rosenstock-Huessy on September 9, 1918, Franz Rosenzweig had said that the difference between geistig (in English, this is spiritual, leaning heavily toward the mental or intellectual, as in Hegel’s use of the term Geist) and geistlich (spiritual in the sense of “sacred”) is “our only theme.” He continues: “Why else are we so infuriated by Hegel? Merely that he doesn’t know this distinction. The classification of religion as a branch [of mind / Geist] actually comes from him. That’s exactly what you taught me.” Everyone familiar with Hegel knows that Geist is translated into English either by the words mind, intellect, or spirit, and that every translator has a difficult time deciding which term to use, precisely because the term does mean all three. But to the extent it means

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spirit, it does not mean soul, in the sense of a capacity or power that belongs to the sacred, and is pre- or supra-mindful. Hegel, of course, wanted to destroy anything that smelled of a beyond, a jenseits. The letter is to be found in the collection that has become known as the Gritli Briefe. It is the collection of letters that were in the possession of Margrit (Gritli) and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. The letters were transcribed by Ulrike Von Moltke and edited by Michael Gormann-Thelen and Dr. Elfriede Büchsel. They have been made available through the Eugen RosenstockHuessy Fund and through Argo Books, at . An edited and somewhat inadequate version can be found at Franz Rosenzweig, Die “Gritli”-Briefe. Briefe an Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy, ed. Inken Rühle and Reinhold Mayer, with an introduction by Rafael Rosenzweig (Tübingen: Bilam Verlag, 2002).-WC 14 Editor’s note. Soziologie I contains an error in placing Descartes’ childhood in Rennes. Rouen is correct.-FH 15 Translator’s note. Conception in the biblical sense: receiving the spirit, which leads to new creation. 16 Translator’s note. The next paragraph in Rosenstock-Huessy’s presentation is apt to confuse a reader unfamiliar with the circumstances of its cryptic reference to Publizistik. I have taken the liberty of re-arranging the text and adding half a sentence to clarify the account of Mersenne’s role. 17 Translator’s note. An important aspect of this role was that reputations would be made and priorities established. A letter written to Mersenne and distributed by him served a not-dissimilar function to today’s copyright (or intellectual property) notice. 18 Translator’s note. It is not clear which Notgemeinschaft the author has in mind. There is a choice of three (indicating something of the turbulence of scientific culture in Germany): (1) Early nineteenth century, when Germany was still a patchwork of several dozen politically autonomous principalities without national institutions; (2) the Hitler era when the wholesale sackings of Jewish scientists wrought havoc with existing institutions; or (3) the post-war reconstructive effort. 19 Editor’s note. Soziologie I lists Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle as “Berylle.” This volume respects the French spelling of his name.-FH 20 See Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Der Atem des Geistes (The breath of the spirit) (Frankfurt a.M.: Verlag der Frankfurter Hefte, 1951). 21 Editor's note. One of the epigrams for Soziologie I is from Theodor Mommsen, in his Römische Forschungen II, 25: Mann kann auch dadurch vom rechten Wege abkommen, daß man zu lange auf dem geraden Pfade bleibt. -FH 22 March 1885. 23 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Soziologie II, Die Vollzahl der Zeiten (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1958). 24 Translator’s note. Nietzsche entertained an unbounded respect for Goethe and almost set him up on a pedestal. One day he learned from an etymologist that the root of Goethe in archaic German denoted der Zeugende—that is, masculine

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procreation, and he jumped for joy. This naïve copulation of name and person, as if the name denoted the capacity of the man, might also fit into the present discussion. 25 Editor’s note. From Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Act III, Scene 2; Wagner’s libretto is inspired in part by Goethe’s poem, “Explanation of an Ancient Woodcut, Representing Hans Sachs’ Poetical Mission.”-FH CHAPTER FIVE: FROM THE STAR OF REDEMPTION TO THE CROSS OF REALITY (GEORG MÜLLER) 1

Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption (Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1921; 3rd ed. 1954); “Das neue Denken: Eine nachträgliche Bemerkung der Stern der Erlösung: (“The New Thinking: Some Additional Remarks on The Star of Redemption,” Der Morgen 1(4). 1925; reprinted in Kleinere Schriften (Berlin: Schocken Books, 1937), 373. 2 Franz Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, vol. 1, 1900-1918, ed. Rachel Rosenzweig and Edith Rosenzweig-Scheinmann (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1935), 637. 3 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Soziologie II (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1958), 737. 4 Georg Müller, “Religionsphilosophie und Heilsgeschichte,” Zeitwende, 10 (1957). 5 Based on formulations by Fritz Vilmar (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 115, May 18, 1957). 6 These are humble corrections to Hans Schomerus’s statements (Christ und Welt, Nr. 1 (1), January 1959) which could lead to the mistaken impression that the attention given to the quality of time would entail an avowal to the history of salvation in and of itself. 7 Rosenstock-Huessy, Soziologie, 260. 8 Rosenstock-Huessy, Soziologie, 233. 9 Rosenstock-Huessy, Soziologie, 725. 10 Rosenstock-Huessy, Soziologie, 224. 11 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Das Geheimnis der Universität (the secret of the university), ed. Georg Müller (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1958), 48. 12 Rosenzweig, Kleinere Schriften, 387. 13 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Der Atem des Geistes (The breath of the Spirit) (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Frankfurter Hefte, 1951), 37. 14 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Die Europäischen Revolutionen und der Charakter der Nationen, 2d ed. (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1951), 110. 15 Rosenstock-Huessy, Soziologie II, 619. 16 Rosenstock-Huessy, Soziologie II, 696. 17 Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William Hallo (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press. 1964), 225. All translations from the Star are from this translated edition.

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18

Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 226. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Des Christen Zukunft, oder Wir überholen die Moderne, trans. Christoph von der Bussche and Konrad Thomas (Munich: Kaiser Verlag, 1955), 271. The cited passage is from the original English version, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future, or the Modern Mind Outrun (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1946), 184. 20 Rosenstock-Huessy, Des Christen Zukunft, 34; The Christian Future, 10. 21 Rosenstock-Huessy, Soziologie II, 373. 22 Rosenstock-Huessy, Soziologie II, 373-74. 23 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption III, 298. 24 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption III, 303-04. 25 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption III, 304-05. 26 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption III, 310-11. 27 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption III, 315. 28 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption III, 323-24. 29 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption III, 329. 30 Rosenstock-Huessy, Das Geheimnis der Universität, 279. 31 Rosenstock-Huessy, Soziologie II, 203. 32 I would like to draw attention to my paper with this title. See Georg Müller, “Vorchristlichen Heilsgeschichte” (“Pre-Christian History of Salvation”) Evangelische Unterweisung, vol. 4 (1958). More on the subject is contained in the following papers: Müller, Georg. “Zum Problem der Sprache. Erwägungen im Anschluß an das Sprachdenken Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy,” Kerygma und Dogma, vol. 2 (1956): 139–154; and “Weltgeschichte und christliche Hoffnung,” Evangelische Unterweisung, vol. 2 (1957). 33 Rosenstock-Huessy, Soziologie II, 202 ff. 34 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Heilkraft und Wahrheit. Konkordanz der politischen und der kosmischen Zeit (The Power of Salvation and Truth. Concordance of the Political and Cosmic time) (Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1952), 174. 35 Rosenstock-Huessy, Soziologie II, 204. 36 Rosenstock-Huessy, Soziologie II, 529. 37 See note 36. 38 Rosenstock-Huessy, Heilkraft und Wahrheit, 175. 39 Rosenstock-Huessy, Heilkraft und Wahrheit, 180. 19

CHAPTER SIX: THE DISCOVERY OF THE NEW THINKING (WOLFGANG ULLMANN) 1

Franz Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und sein Werk. Gesammelte Schriften. I. Bd: Briefe und Tagebücher, ed. Rachel Rosenzweig and Edith RosenzweigScheinmann in collaboration with Bernhard Casper (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979). Two articles that work with this new material and which have improved our knowledge of the Leipzig conversation, are: H.-G. Bloth, Was geschah im Leipziger Nachtgespräch am 7. 7. 1913? (Mitteilungsblätter der Rosenstock-

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Huessy-Gesellschaft 1982, 2-14), and Harold M. Stahmer, “‘Speech-letters’ and ‘Speech-thinking’”(Modern Judaism, 4(1), 1974, 57-82; in German in: Berliner Theologische Zeitschrift 3/2, 1986, 307-329). However, both articles confirm that the letters of Rosenzweig (which had been published in 1935 and 1937) are still the main source of our knowledge about the Leipzig conversation. 2 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 51. 3 Viktor von Weizsäcker, Natur und Geist: Erinnerungen eines Arztes (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck, 1955), 26. 4 Eugen Rosenstock, Königshuas und Stämme in Deutschland zwischen 911 und 1250 (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1914; reprint, Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1965). 5 Eugen Rosenstock, Ostfalens Rechtsliteratur unter Friedrich II. (Weimar: Verlag Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1912). 6 Editor’s note. See Rosenstock-Huessy’s books, Speech and Reality (Norwich, Vt.: Argo Books, 1970) and The Origin of Speech (Norwich, Vt.: Argo Books, 1981). For Rosenstock, the term Sprache primarily refers to important and urgent acts of communication. Thus, he makes a distinction between formal speech and informal talking. It is the former that concerns his method concerning language.WC 7 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 70. 8 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 55. 9 See note 8. 10 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, ed., Judaism Despite Christianity. The Letters on Christianity and Judaism between Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1969), 73. 11 Franz Rosenzweig, Hegel und der Staat, vol. 2 (Munich-Berlin: R. Oldenbourg, 1920), 104, with specific reference to Selma Lagerlöf’s Wunder des Antichrist). 12 Rosenzweig, Hegel und der Staat, 1. 13 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 71. 14 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 72. 15 Tertullian, De Praescriptione Haereticorum (On the Prescription of Heretics), VII, 9. trans. the Rev. Peter Holmes, 1870. 16 Editor’s note. “From: Paul, called to be an apostle of the Messiah Jesus by the will of God, and from our brother Sosthenes.” (1 Corinthians 1, International Standard Version, 2008).-FH 17 Editor’s note. “ … not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another even more as you see the day of the Lord coming nearer.” (Hebrews 10:25—International Standard Version, 2008).-FH 18 Letter to Meinecke, August 30, 1920. 19 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 658. 20 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 65. 21 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 71. 22 John 14:6 (International Standard Version, 2008). 23 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 73. 24 Editor’s note. “… for ‘God has put everything under his feet.’ Now when he says, ‘Everything has been put under him,’ this clearly excludes the one who put

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everything under him” (1 Corinthians 15:27, International Standard Version, 2008). And “… for I want you to let you know about this secret, brothers, so that you will not claim to be wiser than you are: Stubbornness has come to part of Israel until the full number of the gentiles comes to faith.” (Romans 11:25, International Standard Version, 2008).-FH 25 Franz Rosenzweig, Zweistromland. Kleine Schriften zu Glauben und Denken (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 281. 26 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 641 (Rosenstock to Rosenzweig). 27 Rosenzweig, Kleine Schriften, 233. 28 Rosenzweig, Kleine Schriften, 234. 29 Rosenzweig, Kleine Schriften, 274. 30 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 703 (Rosenstock to Rosenzweig). 31 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 664, 697,703 (Rosenstock to Rosenzweig). 32 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 642. 33 Rosenzweig, Kleine Schriften, 420ff. 34 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 650, 701. 35 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 702. 36 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 671. 37 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 675. 38 See note 37. 39 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 663. 40 Rosenzweig, Kleine Schriften, 358. Editor’s note. “The Word became flesh and lived among us. We gazed on his glory, the kind of glory that belongs to the Father's unique Son, who is full of grace and truth.”( John 1:14, International Standard Version, 2008)-FH 41 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 676. 42 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 677. 43 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 679. 44 See note 41. 45 Translator’s note. Emphasis added. 46 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 663. 47 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 681 (Rosenstock to Rosenzweig). 48 See note 47. 49 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 655. (Rosenstock to Rosenzweig). 50 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 686. 51 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 690. 52 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 694. 53 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 717 (Rosenstock to Rosenzweig). 54 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 727ff. 55 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 67. 56 Rosenzweig, Kleine Schriften, 420ff. 57 Rosenzweig, Kleine Schriften, 374. 58 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 641. 59 Rosenzweig, Kleine Schriften, 357-372. 60 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 675-680.

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61 Hans Ehrenberg, Disputation. Drei Bücher vom Deutschen Idealismus (Fichte – Schelling – Hegel), vol. 1 (Munich: Drei Masken Verlag, 1923). 62 Cited according to Ehrenberg, Disputation, vol. 1, 205. 63 Rosenzweig, Kleine Schriften, 359. 64 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 712. 65 Rosenzweig, Kleine Schriften, 390ff. 66 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 706. 67 Rosenzweig, Kleine Schriften, 398. 68 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 720. 69 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 197. 70 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts. Eine leibhaftige Grammatik in vier Teilen, vol. 1 (Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1963), 783. 71 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts, vol. 2 (Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1964), 72. 72 Editor’s note. See “Der Selbstmord Europas” (The suicide of Europe), Hochland 16, vol. 2, Monatsschrift für alle Gebiete des Wissens, der Literatur und Kunst, ed. Karl Muth (September 1919): 529-553. An expanded version of the 1919 article can be found in Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts, vol. 2, 45-84.FH 73 Rosenstock-Huessy, Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts, vol. 2, 74. 74 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, 663.

CHAPTER SEVEN: FRANZ ROSENZWEIG’S LETTERS HUESSY (HAROLD M. STAHMER) 1

TO

MARGRIT ROSENSTOCK-

The following works are recommended to English readers interested in the lives and contributions of Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. Nahum N. Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig. His Life and Thought, New York 1953 and 1961; Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (ed.), Judaism Despite Christianity: The “Letters on Christianity and Judaism” between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig, Alabama—New York 1969 and 1971; Harold M. Stahmer, Speak That I May See Thee! Studies in the Works of J. G. Hamann, Eugen RosenstockHuessy, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Ferdinand Ebner, New York 1968; Paul Mendes-Flohr (ed.), The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, Hanover, New Hampshire 1987; Else Rahel Freund, Franz Rosenzweig’s Philosophy of Existence. An Analysis of The Star of Redemption, The Hague—Boston 1979; George Allen Morgan, Speech and Society. The Christian Linguistic Social Philosophy of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Gainesville 1987; and M. Darrol Bryant and Hans R. Huessy (eds.), Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy: Studies in His Life and Thought, Lewiston, N.Y.—Queenstown, Ont. 1986. 2 Harold M. Stahmer, ‘“Speech-letters” and “Speech-thinking”. Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, in Modern Judaism, IV/1 (1984), pp. 57-82; idem., ‘“Sprachbriefe” and “Sprachdenken”. Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-

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Huessy, in Berliner Theologische Zeitschrift (BThZ), 3.Jahrgang, Heft 2 (1986), pp. 307-329. For a useful discussion of “speech-thinking”, “dialogue”, “orality”, and related themes and issues, cf. Stahmer, Speak That I May See Thee!, op. cit. 3 Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig, op. cit., p. 96. 4 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy to his devoted friend and archivist, Georg Müller (3rd December 1945). From The Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Archives. The Archives are to be found in Norwich, Vermont, Dartmouth College Library, and Bethel, West Germany. 5 The period covered, however, is only from mid-September until the end of November 1918. We know about this from a typed covering letter dated 22nd April 1961, by Rosenstock-Huessy to his intended executor with instructions that the hand-written letters become a permanent part of his estate. 6 Briefe und Tagebücher, The Hague 1979. In this edition, there are 7 published letters to Margrit Rosenstock and 12 references to her in other published correspondence. Three of the 7 letters were written between October and December of 1917; one is dated 15th June 1920, and the remaining 3 were dictated by Rosenzweig in 1924. On a related note, there are 24 published letters from Rosenzweig to Rosenstock which include the 8 sent to Rosenstock (and the 13 from Rosenstock to Rosenzweig) as part of their 1916 correspondence on Judaism and Christianity. There are 78 references to Rosenstock in other published letters in the 1979 edition. What is interesting is that 11 of the remaining 16 published letters were written in 1917 and the remainder in 1925 and 1928 (3 in 1925, 2 in 1928). As was the case with respect to Rosenzweig’s published letters to Gritli, so too vis-à-vis Rosenstock: there are no published letters either to Margrit or to Eugen Rosenstock during the period that Rosenzweig wrote the Star. One way to dramatise the possible significance of this new material is to state that there are a total of 1,275 published letters in the two volume 1979 edition and that there are at least another 1,600 unpublished letters, most of them to Gritli (that Rosenstock knew about), and the remainder to Rosenstock or jointly to him and his wife, that Rosenzweig wrote during a critical period in his life. One final observation about the 1979 edition of the Briefe und Tagebücher that deserves notice is the fact that the “Lebensdaten” or “Biographical Dates” in Rosenzweig’s life that appear in both the 1935 and 1979 editions make no mention of Rosenzweig’s encounter with Rosenstock in 1913, no mention of his exchange of letters on Judaism and Christianity from 29th May to 24th December 1916 (although the letters do appear in both editions; in the earlier 1935 edition in a separate Appendix, and in the 1979 edition they appear chronologically with other published material) and no mention of Rosenzweig’s 18th November 1917 letter to his cousin, Rudolf Ehrenberg, identified as the “Urzelle”, “Germ Cell”, of the Star, which does appear, however, in Rosenzweig’s Kleinere Schnften (1937) and in Zweistromland (1984). By contrast, English readers are most fortunate in having available Glatzer’s, Franz Rosenzweig, op. cit., where these events are given appropriate recognition in his list of ‘Biographical Dates. 7 Rosenstock-Huessy (ed.),Judaism Despite Christianity, op. cit., p. 98 (undated letter).

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Notes

Ibid. p. 31. Ibid. p. 73. 10 lbid., p. 76. 11 Ibid., p. 28. 12 Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, ‘From Relativism to Religious Faith. The Testimony of Franz Rosenzweig’s Unpublished Diaries,’ in LBI Year Book XXII (1977); Amos Funkenstein, ‘The Genesis of Rosenzweig’s Stern der Erlösung: “Urformel” and “Urzelle”, in Jahrbuch des Instituts für Deutsche Geschichte (Beiheft 4, April 1982); cf. also Hugo Gotthard Bloth, ‘Was geschah im “Leipziger Nachtgespräch” am 7.7.1913 zwischen den Freunden Eugen Rosenstock, Franz Rosenzweig und Rudolf Ehrenberg?, in Mitteilungsblatt der Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy-Gesellschaft (1982). 13 Franz Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und sein Werk, Gesammelte Schriften, III, Zweistromland, The Hague 1984, p. 152, cf. also Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig, op. cit., p. 200. 14 Rosenstock-Huessy (ed.), Judaism Despite Christianity, op. cit., p. 170. 15 An unpublished letter from The Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Archives. 16 However, when Angewandte Seelenkunde appeared in print in 1924, Rosenstock had dedicated it to the Huessy home in Säckingen and concluded his “Vorwort” with “Säckingen am Rhein/SonntagJudica 1924”. Whether he decided to rededicate the work after receiving a somewhat mixed reaction to it from Rosenzweig is uncertain. The problem is complicated by the fact that when the work was reprinted in Rosenstock-Huessy’s two-volume Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts, Heidelberg 1963, the Inhaltsverzeichnis reads “Angewandte Seelenkunde (1916 und 1923)”, the original “Vorwort” had been slightly rewritten, and in a footnote to the title, Rosenstock-Huessy wrote, “... Sie ging 1916 als ‘Sprachbrief an Franz Rosenzweig zur Abwehr aller Sprachphilosophie, und so ist sie die älteste Urkunde eines Sprachdenkens, in dem die Epoche von Parmenides bis Hegel ausgeschieden ist.” 17 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Ja und Nein. Autobiographische Fragmente, Heidelberg 1968, p. 168. 18 lbid., p. 170. 19 Ibid., p. 169. 20 Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig, op. cit., pp. 90-91. 21 Rosenstock-Huessy, Ja und Nein, op. cit., p. 169. 22 Rosenstock-Huessy, Ja und Nein, op. cit., p. 169. 23 Rosenstock-Huessy, Ja und Nein, op. cit., p. 172. 24 Ibid. 25 Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig, op. cit., p. 200. 26 I am indebted to Nahum Glatzer who provided me with a copy of the unpublished portions of Rosenzweig’s “Urzelle” letter to Rudolf Ehrenberg. 27 Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, II, op. cit., pp. 641—643. 28 An unpublished letter from The Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Archives. 29 Cf. Bernard Casper, “Von Einheit und Ewigkeit. Ein Gespräch zwischen Leib und Seele”, in Bulletin des Leo Baeck Instituts, 74 (1986). Casper has published 9

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the “Gritlianum” in his article, but I wish it to be understood that I am in fundamental disagreement with his presentation and interpretation of the significance of this material. 30 Cf. Hans Ehrenberg, Die Parteiung der Philosophie, Leipzig 1911. 31 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo, New York 1970. The cone-shaped format used here follows that adopted in the German and English editions. CHAPTER EIGHT: THE GREAT GIFT (WAYNE CRISTAUDO) References to “Microfilm reel” and accompanying information refer to documents found in the Collected Works on Microfilm, fully referenced in Lise van der Molen, ed., A Guide to the Works of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (Essex, Vt.: Argo Books, 1997) and accessible on: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Collected Works on DVD (Essex, Vt.: Argo Books, 2002). 1

The discussion about philosophy or philosophizing in the form of a calendar is contained in a letter from Rosenstock-Huessy to Rosenzweig, May 29, 1916, and discussed by Alexander Altmann in “Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen RosenstockHuessy: An Introduction to their ‘Letters on Judaism and Christianity’.” Both references can be found in Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, ed. Judaism Despite Christianity (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1969) 72 and 44, respectively. The Altmann essay, along with Dorothy Emmet’s “The Letters of Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy,” first appeared in The Journal of Religion, October 1944 . 2 Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 109-110, 112. 3 Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 111-112. 4 Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 157. 5 Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 165-166. 6 Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 113. 7 Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 159. 8 Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 136. 9 Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 160. 10 The following passage from Rivka Horwitz is instructive on this matter: “… like other Jewish scholars, Glatzer kept a distance from Jews who had converted to Christianity and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy was a convert to the Christian faith, a meshumad. There is a tradition of keeping away from converts. Alexander Altmann, and Gershom Scholem, for example, avoided Rosenstock-Huessy. Altmann wrote about him, but refused to visit him. Ernst Simon was friendly with him in Germany, but later in Israel advised me to avoid him. Only the philosopher Hugo Bergman had a different opinion. In his book, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, Glatzer presented Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy in an improper way. He purposely devoted very little room to him–only a few pages—whereas in reality,

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Rosenstock-Huessy had been a major figure in Rosenzweig’s life. Glatzer admitted to me that he had done this on purpose.” Rivka Horwitz, “The Shaping of Rosenzweig’s Identity According to the Gritli Letters,” Rosenzweig als Leser, ed. Martin Brasser (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2004), 12-13. (It should be said that Michael Gormann-Thelen finds this claim about Glatzer and Altmann incredulous, given the lack of archival evidence to support it.) The issue of conversion is a very heated one and at times the treatment of it borders on the hysterical. 11 Ignaz Maybaum, Trialogue Between Jew, Christian and Muslim (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 103. A recent example of moral hysteria posing as analysis can be found in David J. Wasserstein, “Now let us proclaim—The conversions of Franz Rosenzweig,” in the Times Literary Supplement, June 27, 2008. Wasserstein compares Rosenzweig’s interest in conversion to Medieval forced conversions of Jews, which resulted in the death of anyone who refused. Nothing in Wasserstein’s analogy works—beginning with completely ignoring Rosenzweig’s own desire in the matter of a possible conversion to Christianity to the vastly different social conditions and pressures in these different worlds. Wasserstein and Anidjar typify an all-too-widespread strand of academia that sacrifices all the nuances that constitute a truth for the academics’ own morally and politically hyperbolic cast of mind. 12 I am grateful to Harold Stahmer for finding this statement. It is cited in “Franz, Eugen, and Gritli: ‘Respondeo esti mutabor’.” In Wolfdietrich von SchmiedKowarzik, ed., Franz Rosenzweigs “Neues Denken,” vol. 2 (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 2004), 1167. 13 Again I am grateful for Michael Gormann-Thelen for bringing this to my attention. 14 Franz Rosenzweig Briefe (Berlin: Schocken, 1935), 638. See also the conclusion of Wolfgang Ullmann, “Die Entdeckung des neuen Denkens. Das Leipziger Religionsgespräch und der Briefwechsel über Judentum und Christentum zwischen Eugen Rosenstock und Franz Rosenzweig,” Wir die Buerger! Auf nach Europa, Deutschland und zu Uns Selbst! Zivil poltische Aufsaetze, (Essen: Die blaue Eule, 2002), 175-203. See also the translation in this volume. It is a great pity that the English edition does not contain any traces of this reference. 15 See Jordan J. Ballor, “The Aryan Clause, the Confessing Church, and the Ecumenical Movement: Barth and Bonhoeffer on Natural Theology, 1933-1935,” Scottish Journal of Theology 59 (2006): 263-280. 16 See the chapter “Why is the Theology of Karl Barth of Interest?” in Michael Wyschogrod, Abraham’s Promise: Judaism and Christian Relations, ed. R. Kendall Soulen, (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2004), 221-222. I think he makes an excellent point when he says while Barth was very astute about Nazi anti-Semitism, he failed to appreciate the extent to which Communism had made war on the God of Israel. See also Katherine Sonderegger’s That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew: Karl Barth’s “Doctrine of Israel” (University Park, Penn.: Pennyslvania University Press, 1992).

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17 Letter to Rosenstock-Huessy from Edith Rosenzweig June 4, 1955. I think it is just as likely that Edith had another motive for not wishing to see the publication. She knew that once the friendship between Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig was again brought to the light of the public, the ghost of Rosenzweig’s relationship to Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy would reappear, which is exactly what eventually happened. 18 But when Rosenstock-Huessy drew attention to his own Jewish origin Rosenzweig indicated that apostasy trumps blood. Rosenstock-Huessy addressed Rosenzweig on September 13, 1916, as “Dear Fellow (Jew + post-Christum natum + post-Hegel mortuum)” and Rosenzweig’s response is full of ire: “… you are directly hindering me from treating my Judaism in the first person, in that you call yourself a Jew too. That is equally intolerable, emotionally and intellectually. For me you can be nothing but a Christian; the emptiest Jew, cut off root and branch and a Jew only in the legal sense, is still an object of concern to me as a Jew, but you are not.” See Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 94, and 9899. In other words, Rosenzweig is reminding Rosenstock-Huessy that unlike mere disbelievers he is an apostate. One finds a similar kind of tone in a letter on December 26, 1917, to his cousin, also a Christian convert from Judaism and an apostate, Hans Ehrenberg. He tells his cousin, “The dumbest Jewish boy has more right (and ability) for this kind of judgment than you.” The letter is translated by Ronald Miller in his Dialogue and Disagreement: Franz Rosenzweig’s Relevance to Contemporary Jewish-Christian Understanding, (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1989), 88-89. The significance of apostasy in Judaism can be gauged from Deuteronomy 13:6-10, where apostates are to be condemned to death, though Rosenzweig is no biblical literalist. But, of course, throughout their history, the Church (even including some Reformers such as John Calvin) had also claimed and exercised what they took as their God-given “right” to use physical coercion and instruments of death over apostates. Miller’s book, while providing translations of a lot of relevant letters, is astonishingly neglectful of RosenstockHuessy, with barely a reference to him. Nevertheless, he is right when he says that “Jews and Christians cannot understand themselves and each other if they are attempting to live within a so called Jewish-Christian amalgam” (90), while yet seeking common dialogical space between them. 19 Of course, there were self-designated “Christians” who were Hitler supporters and sympathizers. Rosenstock-Huessy would frequently recount the story of a colleague of his who had hailed Hitler as Christ. He used the story as an example of pagan idolatry. See Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1938; reprint, London: Jarrolds, 1939; Norwich, Vt.: Argo Books, 1969; Providence, R.I.: Berg Publishers, 1993), 443. For the kind of tortured synthesis of Nazism and Christianity see D. Cajus Fabricius’ work, Positive Christianity in the Third Reich (Dresden: Hermann Püschel, 1937). The book concludes with the sentence: “But the energy and great wisdom of our Führer will assuredly find the proper way out of all difficulties, and we as Christian National Socialists firmly believe that the

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Guide of the history of nations will direct the most sacred cause of the German people to a glorious end,” 72. 20 Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 113. 21 Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 145. On this point of the Jews as killers of Christ, compare Rosenstock-Huessy’s remark: “Children are accustomed to call their Jewish classmates "Christ-killer;" but are they ever told that they themselves by saying so kill the God in their hearts? And that the whole meaning of Jesus’ forgiveness was that we all do so at times.” Eugen RosenstockHuessy, “The End of the World or When Theology Slept,” Unpublished: 1941) Microfilm reel 7, item 356, page: 5 / 19. [Editor’s note. See chap. 1 of this volume for the full text.-FH] 22 Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 176-177. 23 See particularly Rosenzweig’s letter of November 7, 1916. Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 129-138. 24 Harold Stahmer, ed. and trans. Franz Rosenzweig’s Letters to Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy (New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1989), 397. 25 Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 154. 26 From June 24, 1918. Harold Stahmer, Franz Rosenzweig’s Letters, 391. 27 Judaism Despite Christianity, 71. 28 The examples are too numerous to cite, but this from one of his 1954 lecture courses, Circulation of Thought, is typical: A man who—for example, says, “I”—he can—“I want power,” has the devil's religion, because he has not—never the—doubted his own capacity of being his better self. Now I know that I'm very often my worst self— my own worst enemy, and only occasionally am I my friend. Very occasionally. Most people are their own worst enemies. Therefore, religion is the way in which you split yourself into service, or obedience, or suffering, or passivity, and acceptance of what comes to you, and obstinacy, and upheaval, and rebellion. This religion every man has, gentlemen. That's your decision. Where is God? Partly He's in us, partly He's against us. Every one of you knows that sometimes it is very good that our will is not done. And sometimes it is very good that our will may be done, because one time our will is in harmony with the—with divine— the divine purpose, and another time, it is very little in harmony with it. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Circulation of Thought – 1954, vol. 9, lect. 14 (March 26, 1954), 7; Reel 16, Item 634. Rosenstock-Huessy writes again in a manner no different in its emphasis from that of Rosenzweig: All true prayer begins with establishing distance between two poles: one, the sacrifice of a mortal's own ideas and ideals, that is, his self-will, thus making room for God's will by repentance; the other a majesty of light, future, creativity. Prayer is the act by which the potential between the two poles, God and man, is enhanced or enlarged; the hollowness of man and the glory of God both are increased. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “Hitler und Israel oder vom Gebet,” Beiheft Stimmstein (Mössingen-Talheim: Talheimer Verlag, 1992), 30.

Notes

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Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 75. Rosenzweig, Briefe, 381 ff. 31 Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 75-76. 32 Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 71. 33 Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 71-72. 34 I Am an Impure Thinker (Norwich, Vt.: Argo Books, 1969), 35. 35 Rosenzweig “was the first to speak of the revolutionary fact of the exposure of the three groups [Jews, pagans, and Christians] to each other.” Die jüdischen Antisemiten oder die akademische Form der Judenfrage, 8. That Rosenzweig’s insight was something rather novel can be gauged by Rosenstock-Huessy’s remark in Out of Revolution that: “As far as I know, the Jews in 1789 did not discriminate in their language between pagans and Christians. They did not believe in the genuineness of the Christian faith.” (p. 216). The section in which he says this is one saturated with Rosenzweig. 36 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “Stahl, Gambetta, Marx: Drei europäischen Juden,” Abbau der politischen Lüge (Frankfurt am Main: Carolus Druckerei, 1924), reel 2, item 138, 62-68. 37 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 218. 38 Abbau, 71. 39 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “Hitler and Israel, or On Prayer,” Letters to Cynthia (Harris) (published privately, 1943-1944; also in: Journal of Religion 25, no. 2 [1945]), October 19, 1944, reel 7, item 378. 40 Rosenstock-Huessy, “Hitler and Israel, or On Prayer,” 20. 41 See note 40. 42 In her preface to “Hitler and Israel,” Cynthia Harris asks the question: “How did it happen, then, that the Christians went on to develop their virulent anti-Semitism, culminating in Hitler’s concentration camps?” She refers to Christianity’s long anti-Jewish history, while adding that the question did not interest RosenstockHuessy. I think it is a fair criticism that nowhere does he provides a systematic account of the Church’s long history of anti-Jewish edicts and the like. Nor does he discuss either the frequency or extent of anti-Jewish outbursts in major figures of the Church. So there is undoubtedly a weakness in his treatment of anti-Semitism. In Out of Revolution, he does talk of Christianity’s anti-Jewish outbreaks being desperate acts of self- preservation in moments of extreme crisis, not, though as is evident below, to be justified on that account: The fifteenth century offers a good example of Jewish persecutions at a time when Christianity was frightened by the approaching downfall of its visible unity. The fear of Reformation and dissolution spread all over Europe between 1450 and 1517, and led to violent pogroms. The pogroms were the lightning-rod that protected Papacy; they averted Luther's Reformation for fifty years. The same could perhaps be said of Czarist Russia. There, too, the Jews were one of the lightningconductors of the regime. These atrocities of a senescent institution fighting for a longer span of life are always peculiarly insulting and outrageous. But as mankind's propensity to war is not explained by 30

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condemning iniquitous wars, neither are persecutions explained by condemning iniquitous persecutions. (p. 227). And he also compares Hitler to the anti-Semite Giovanni Capistrano, who burned Jews and led a crusade against the Turks, and who “had a tremendous following between 1445 and 1455, delay[ing] the Reformation for another fifty years by defending the dictatorship of a ruthless papacy.”(Out of Revolution, 601). 43 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 216. 44 See note 43. 45 A little further down the page Rosenstock-Huessy refers to a “great Jewish scholar” without naming him, who characterized “the follies of pagan philosophy” as “crude pagan superstition.” This clearly refers to Rosenzweig, who on the opening page of The Star speaks of philosophy creating another world because of its fear of death. 46 Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 97 ff. The implication is found by comparing the task of the Pauline mission, which then has to win over pagan souls. See the chapter contained in this volume: Matthew del Nevo, “Goethe as the First Father of the Johannine Age,” which discusses Rosenzweig’s three ages of the Church. 47 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future—or The Modern Mind Outrun (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), with an introduction by Harold Stahmer, p. 108. 48 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Soziologie, vol. II, Die Vollzahl der Zeiten (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer) p. 734 (trans. Wayne Cristaudo). 49 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 437-438. 50 Cf. Peter Eli Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2003), 8384. The readings of Else Freund, Wolfgang Schmied-Kowarzik, and Bernhard Caspar all treat Rosenzweig as an existentialist, while Eric Santner’s On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) is post-modernist. Then there are the confused mixtures that would have him as existentialist, post-modernist, and modernist all in one. An example of this is found in S. Daniel Breslauer, Toward a Jewish (M)Orality: Speaking of a Postmodern Jewish Ethics (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Greenwood, 1998), 83-84. Such approaches, while bringing out certain layers of Rosenzweig, all are in danger of completely missing what is new about “new thinking,” and equally important what Rosenzweig sees as unique about the Jewish life. 51 To Rudolf Hallo, February 4, 1923. Franz Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und sein Werk; Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 1: Briefe und Tagebücher, ed. Rachel Rosenzweig and Edith Rosenzweig-Scheinmann, in collaboration with Bernhard Casper (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979). 888-889. 52 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 438-39. 53 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption,, 438. 54 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 401-402. Cf “It is Time: Concerning the Study of Judaism”: “Judaism…is the goal of the future,” which is also, in a most

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pithy manner, the essence of his entire life’s work. Franz Rosenzweig, On Jewish Learning, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), p. 30. 55 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 426. 56 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 427. 57 July 2, 1919, Gritli Briefe. 58 “Die jüdischen Antisemiten oder die akademische Form der Judenfrage,” Frankfurter Hefte 6, Heft 1, Zeitschrift für Kultur und Politik, ed. Eugen Kogon, with assistance from Walter Dirks (1951): 9. 59 Rosenstock’s own translation of "Die jüdischen Antisemiten” and in Das Geheimnis der Universität—Wider den Verfall von Zeitsinn und Sprachkraft, ed. Georg Müller (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1958), 44-55. Microfilm reel 9, item 442: 17-32. For Niemöller ‘s anti-Semitic history see Robert Michaels, who wrote: … at the Prussian Synod of the Confessing Church held at Berlin in September 1935, Niemoeller unsuccessfully argued for an expression of brotherly support for Jewish Christians. Yet Niemoeller's actions during this period were leavened with hostility to Jewish Jews. Niemoeller himself admitted that even his defence of baptized Jews was tainted, because it was only “scriptural, ecclesiastical, and theological rather than ethical or humanitarian.” His Sätze zur Arierfrage, published in November 1933, confirmed that his support of converted Jews was disagreeable. It was, in fact, as he wrote, “a matter of real self-denial to champion their cause. Moreover, in the same year, he advocated a separate Protestant Church for the baptized Jews. At his trial in 1938, he stated in his defence that even baptized “Jews were alien and uncongenial to him.” That God had revealed himself in the Jew, Jesus, was to Niemöller a “painful and grievous stumbling-block [that] has to be accepted.” From the pulpit, until his incarceration, his silence about the Jews was thundering. As in his hesitating defence of the baptized, he was most likely influenced by both his enthusiasm for the Nazis' national revival and his theological anti-Semitism. And so at the very time that Niemöller was begrudgingly defending the so-called non-Aryan Christians, he was acquiescing in the Nazi onslaught against the Jewish Jews. With the exception of a mild exhortation to his parishioners in June 1933 to love one's neighbor, be he Christian or Jew, and a sermon in 1935, Niemoeller stood publicly silent on the status and condition of the Jewish Jews. Robert Michael, “Theological Myth, German Antisemitism and the Holocaust: The Case of Martin Niemoeller,” in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 2, no. 1(1987): 112. 59 “All true prayer,” writes Rosenstock-Huessy again in a manner no different in its emphasis from what one finds in Rosenzweig, “begins with establishing distance between two poles: one, the sacrifice of a mortal's own ideas and ideals, i.e., his self-will, thus making room for God's will by repentance; the other a majesty of light, future, creativity. Prayer is the act by which the potential between the two poles, God and man, is enhanced or enlarged; the hollowness of man and the glory of God both are increased.” Rosenstock-Huessy, “Hitler and Israel,” 30.

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Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “Zwölf Bücher,” Die Zwölf Wegbereiter. Ein Almanach persönlicher Beratung für das Jahr 1921, ed. Leo Weismantel (Munich / Frankfurt: Verlag der Arbeitsgemeinschaft, 1921), 43-45. Also reel 2, item 111. This piece had been all but forgotten until it was reproduced by Michael GormannThelen in The Legacy of Franz Rosenzweig, ed. Luc Anckaert, Martin Brasser, & Norbert Samuelson, (Leuven : Leuven University Press, 2004), 76-77. 61 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “Ehrlos–Heimatlos,” Hochzeit des Krieges und der Revolution (Würzburg: Patmos-Verlag, 1920), 246; and Eugen RosenstockHuessy, Die Sprache des Menschengeschelechts. Eine leighaftige Grammatik in vier Teilen, vol. 2 (Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1964), 109. 62 “Ehrlos–Heimatlos” in Hochzeit, 249, Die Sprache des Menschengeschelechts, vol. 2, 114. 63 Rosenstock-Huessy, Hochzeit des Krieges, 250; Die Sprache des Menschengenschlechts, vol. 2, 114. The body he collected himself was also Gentile, hence for Rosenstock-Huessy his body being pagan. 64 “All true prayer,” writes Rosenstock-Huessy again in manner no different in its emphasis from what one finds in Rosenzweig, begins with establishing distance between two poles: one, the sacrifice of a mortal's own ideas and ideals, i.e., his self-will, thus making room for God's will by repentance; the other a majesty of light, future, creativity. Prayer is the act by which the potential between the two poles, God and man, is enhanced or enlarged; the hollowness of man and the glory of God both are increased. Rosenstock-Huessy, “Hitler und Israel,” Stimmstein (1992), 30. 65 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 187. It is precisely the “No” of revelation that Rosenzweig believes Islam does not grasp. For it is bound up—like Stoicism, with which he compares Islam—with an ethics of achievement, while “for faith, the singular ethical act is itself worthless and one can at most see in it the sign of a global attitude of humble fear before God.” Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 186. The “No” that is so necessary for revelation also must include “No” to the faith in one’s own activity. But, says Rosenzweig, Mohammad thought that he had made things easy for his people by prescribing precisely what to do (what the law does not proscribe is permitted in Islam). Mohammed “thought he could spare both himself and disciples the inner conversion. He did not know that all Revelation begins with a great No.” (187) 66 Rosenstock-Huessy, “Hitler and Israel”, 19. 67 Rosenstock-Huessy, “Hitler and Israel,” Microfilm reel 8, item 390, p. 6/11. 68 Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 140. 69 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 237.

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CHAPTER NINE: ORATE THINKER VERSUS LITERATE THINKER (MICHAEL GORMANN-THELEN) 1

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “The Predicament of History,” Journal of Philosophy 32, 4 (1935): 93-100. 2 See Spivak, Gyatri Chakravorty, The Spivak Reader, ed. Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean (New York: Routledge) 1996. 3 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Joseph Wittig, “Ama quia durissimum,” Das Alter der Kirche (Berlin: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1927-1928); rev. ed., vol. 1, Fritz Herrenbrück and Michael Gormann-Thelen (Münster: agenda Verlag, 1997), 107-135. See also Wolfgang Ullmann, “Ama quia durissimum—Imperativ der Menschlichkeit inmitten der Gefahr ethnokratischer Regression,”Wir, die Bürger! Auf nach Europa, Deutschland und zu uns selbst! Zivilpolitische Aufsätze, ed. Michael Gormann-Thelen (Essen: Verlag Die Blaue Eule, 2002), 163-174. 4 See also Henry James’ short story, “The Real Thing” (1893). 5 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Practical Knowledge of the Soul, trans. Mark Huessy and Freya von Moltke (Norwich, Vt.: Argo Books, 1988; originally published as Angewandte Seelenkunde: Eine programmatische Übersetzung, Darmstadt: Röther-Verlag, 1924; also in Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts, vol. 1, 1963; see note 7). 6 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, ed., Judaism despite Christianity. The “Letters on Christianity and Judaism between Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig. (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1969; reprint, New York: Schocken Books 1971) 169-170. 7 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “Angewandte Seelenkunde,” Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts. Eine leibhaftige Grammatik in vier Teilen, vol. 1 (Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1963), 739: Nunmehr ist die erste Hälfte dieser leibhaftigen Grammatik abgeschlossen. Freilich sind ihre beiden Themen: “Wer spricht?” und “Wie wird gesprochen?” unendlicher Entfaltung fähig. Aber einem willigen Leser sollte der Weg aus der bisherigen alexandrinischen Grammatik in eine inkarnierende Sprachlehre geöffnet sein. Die folgende Zusammenfassung legt ihn darauf fest. Sie ging 1916 als “Sprachbrief” an Franz Rosenzweig zur Abwehr alle Sprachphilosophie, und so ist sie die älteste Urkunde eines Sprachdenkens, in dem die Epoche von Parmenides bis Hegel ausgeschieden ist. 8 Sometimes the German language is as short or laconic as Latin or English: Alle Sprachphilosophie verwechselt Sprechenkönnen mit Sprechenmüssen. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “Angewandte Seelenkunde,” Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts. Eine leibhaftige Grammatik in vier Teilen, vol. 1 (Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1963), 757. 9 See Jacques Derrida, “Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German,“ In: Jacques Derrida, ed. Acts of Religion (New York, London: Routledge, 2002), 135188. Derrida’s essay is also a commentary on Franz Rosenzweig.

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On Rosenzweig’s relationship to Goethe, see especially his introduction to Book III of The Star of Redemption. Rosenzweig called this part a Goetheologie, (Goethe + theology). 11 Rosenzweig’s so-called germ cell of The Star of Redemption—a relapse into idealistic philosophy—is thoroughly Fichtean, not Schellingian. See Alan Udoff and Barbara E. Galli, eds. and trans., Franz Rosenzweig’s“The New Thinking,“ (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1998), 45-66. Rosenstock-Huessy was fighting such a relapse into philosophy throughout his 1916 correspondence with Franz Rosenzweig. Rosenstock-Huessy’s Practical Knowledge of the Soul was a type of anti-tractatus to the germ cell’s philosophy without the “You.” 12 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution—Autobiography of Western Man (New York: Morrow, 1938; reprint, Norwich, Vt.: Argo Books, 1969; Providence, R.I.: Berg Publishers, 1993), 405. 13 This magnum opus (over 1,600 pages long) is at the same time a continuous commentary on Rosenstock’s relationship to Franz Rosenzweig, although his name is mentioned only a couple of times. 14 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, I Am an Impure Thinker (Norwich, Vt.: Argo Books 1970). Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Ich bin ein unreiner Denker—vom TöchterlichWerden des Denkens (I am an impure thinker—thinking becoming daughterly). In: Das Geheimnis der Universität. Wider den Verfall von Zeitsinn und Sprachkraft, ed. Georg Müller (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 1958), 97-112. See also Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 740 ff. 15 A revised edition with annotations in three volumes can be found at: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Im Kreuz der Wirklichkeit. Eine nach-goethesche Soziologie (In the Cross of Reality. A Post-Goethean Sociology), ed. Michael GormannThelen, Ruth Mautner, and Lise van der Molen (Talheim-Mössingen: Talheimer Verlag, 2009). 16 See Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen. The Life of a Jewess. ed Liliane Weissberg, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Also Barbara Hahn, Bitte antworten Sie mir! Rahel Levin Varnhagens Briefwechsel (Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 1990). 17 Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967). 18 See Eric Santner, My Own Private Germany. Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). 19 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912), 131-132, entry from 1845.

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CHAPTER TEN: SOVEREIGNTY AND SACRIFICE (GREGORY KAPLAN) 1

Dan Philpott, “Sovereignty: An Introduction and Brief History,” Journal of International Affairs, winter 1995, vol. 48, no. 2: 356-57. 2 Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 78. A polity or political territory is “a ‘state’ if and insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds a claim on the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order.” Max Weber, Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. By A. M. Anderson and Talcott Parsons (The Free Press, 1964), 154. 3 “Authority is the right to command and correlatively the right to be obeyed.” Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism (New York: Harper & Row, 1970; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 4. 4 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Practical Knowledge of the Soul, trans. Mark Huessy and Freya von Moltke (Norwich, Vt.: Argo Books, 1988; originally published as Angewandt Seelenkunde: Eine programmatische Übersetzung, Darmstadt: RötherVerlag, 1924), 34-36. 5 Franz Rosenzweig, On Jewish Learning, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 98. 6 See Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, ed. Judaism Despite Christianity (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1969), 72-73. 7 Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 32. Dorothy Emmet, trans. See also Edith Rosenzweig, ed., Franz Rosenzweig: Briefe (Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1935), 638-39. Cf. Paul Mendes-Flohr, Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig (Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England (Brandeis University Press, 1988), 5. 8 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality (Norwich, Vt.: Argo Books, 1970), 16-19. 9 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 22, 24. 10 Franz Rosenzweig and Nahum N. Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought (New York: Schocken Books, 1961; reprint, Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing, 1998), 28. Franz Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und Sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften, I, herausgegeben von Rachel Rosenzweig und EdithRosenzweig-Scheinmann (Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 132-133. 11 Because the Jewish people “rejects” any notion “that he (or it) in whom (or which) [the Christians] could fulfill their world-historical mission would have already come,” any living Jew attests to the incompletion of a “mission” which brings every individual together into the “whole truth” of “‘common humanity,’ where Mensch and Christ will be one.” Note that Deuteronomy 30:11-14 already counters Paul’s contention (Romans 7:13-25) that the law is un-fulfill-able; in principle the law could be fulfilled anytime by anyone, since it is only the external expression of our own hearts’ desire.

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12 My translation of Heiden and Heidentum into pagans and paganism—literally meaning Greeks and Greek (noun)—makes the best sense in later contexts. 13 See Edith Wyschogrod, “Value,” in Mark C. Taylor, ed., Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 365-382. 14 See Jill Robbins, “Sacrifice,” in Critical Terms, 289. See also Gregory Alles, “Exchange,” Guide to the Study of Religion, ed., Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (London and New York: Continuum Books), 110-124. 15 See Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 94-101, especially footnote 64. The “distortion of the future after the Protestant manner, which explains (in direct challenge to Romans 11) that queer unloading of the Church as a task onto the converted Jewish people in order that Christianity until the Second Coming should have nothing to do but be tempted and divided from the world, and leave it to the busy and industrious People of God to do the rest…offends me.” p. 101. 16 The verse links the Hebrew root amn in the words “trust, believe,” “made firm, sure,” and “confirmed, established”; see The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2004), 53. 17 See Rosenstock-Huessy, GS I: 256, 276. See also Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 117-123. Karl Barth’s 1924 “Word of God and Word of Man” reconsiders the Christianity that Heidegger could not have abided in Rosenstock-Huessy. 18 Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 124. 19 For among the pagans and the Jews alike “everyone aspires to be founder, father, owner, testator, ancestor, guardian, master”; each “rules a piece of the world.” Judaism is “naïve” to assert “rights in perpetuity against God, which by nature remain for posterity as properties inherited by bequest.” Only the Christian “knows a second kingdom of poverty, weakness, dependence, minority, shame, repentance, and shy childishness.” Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 124. 20 Dorothy Emmet notes, “the synagogue has not faced this question of living in the world, and hence, … her sterility.” Judaism Despite Christianity, 59. Evidently Rosenstock considers the Jewish claim to Diaspora as equivalent to the pagan claim to autochthony. 21 Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 127-128. Rosenstock-Huessy added that “the ‘eternal Jew’ has a horizontal two-dimensional interest in religion, and Time is bound up in him, and it is, as it were, always being fulfilled just because it is never fulfilled. The ‘eternal community’ has a vertically directed impulse. Because it strives in every moment to behave as if it were worldwide, because even the individual Christian is almost as the whole body, and the microcosm and the God-man is taken seriously, so its longing is turned towards Time, towards the discerning and fulfilling of epochs.” Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity,156. 22 The verse links in the Hebrew root amn the words “trust, believe” (Exodus 4:31, 14:31, 19:19, etc), “made firm, sure” (Isaiah 22:23-25, 33:16, etc), and “confirmed,

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established” (1 Samuel 2:35, 3:20, etc); see the note at Brown-Driver-Briggs, 53. See Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 129-138. 23 Upon conquering the port city of Carthage in 146 BCE, according to Polybius, the wife of its failed defending general Hasdrubal cursed her husband's surrender and cast herself and her two sons into a pyre, followed by numerous Romans soldiers who had previously deserted and turned coat, thus leading the conquering Roman consul Scipio Aemilianus to exclaim the Homeric line that prophesied, “the day shall come when sacred Troy shall fall, and King Priam and all his warrior people with him.” 24 He wrote in June 1914: “Auch wenn ich rituell lebte … ich jetzt Jude bin,” Gesammelte Schriften I, 161. 25 Rosenzweig lists contemporary influences on The Star of Redemption in Rosenzweig and Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, 200-201; see Mendes-Flohr, Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, 10. 26 Franz Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking,” ed. and trans. Alan Udoff and Barbara E. Galli (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 46, and Der Mensch und Sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften III, herausgegeben von Reinhold und Annemarie Mayer (den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1984) 125. 27 “Heaven and Earth—which is real, and can no longer be relativized … and a real firm Earlier and Later in time… In the natural world … the point where I happen to be is the center of the universe; in the space-time world of revelation the center is fixed, and my movements do not alter it.” See “The New Thinking” 4546, and Franz Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings, ed. and trans. Paul Franks and Michael Morgan (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing Company, 2000), 49-50, Gesamelte Schriften III, 125-126; see RosenstockHuessy, Judiasm Despite Christianity, 43-44, 118-123; see Rosenzweig, Gesammelte Schriften I, 357-359, and Rosenzweig, Briefe, 710. See Alexander Altmann, “About the Correspondence,” Judaism Despite Christianity, 43-44, on Rosenzweig’s letter dated 28 October 1918, 118-123. See also Stéphane Mosès, System and Revelation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1991) 34. 28 Philosophical and Theological Writings, 63-64, and Star of Redemption, 187. Yet Rosenzweig’s concept differs from Rosenstock-Huessy’s insofar as revelation is not a “midpoint” which situates a thing in time, but a prick that punctures time, interrupting the endurance of creation. 29 Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking” 45-46). 30 In a 1917 letter to Gertrud Oppenheim, Rosenzweig wrote: “Also durchaus keine geringe Bedeutung. Sie fristen uns das Leben in der Zeit. Denn Israel muss sich auch vom Heute zum Morgen und Übermorgen durchschlagen, damit es jederzeit ein Heute hat, aus dem es das ‘Heute’ jener Legende hervorrufen kann, wenn es sich dazu entschließt. Nur aus dem Leben führt das Sprungbrett ins Jenseits; Tote, die nie gelebt hätten würden sicher nicht unsterblich werden können” ‘nicht geboren sein’ ist nicht ‘das Beste’.” Rosenzweig and Glatzer, His Life and Thought, 47-48, Gesammelte Schriften I, 344-46. See Grete Schaeder, ed. Martin Buber:Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzenten vol. 1 (Heidelberg: Verlag

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Lambert Schneider, 1972), letters 248 and 377. See also Rivka Horwitz and Martin Buber, Buber’s Way to “I and Thou”: The Development of Martin Buber’s Thought and His “Religion as Presence” Lectures (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1988),184. Florens Christian Rang's comments on the galleys of I and Thou make speech into the centerpiece that Rosenzweig was picking up from Rosenstock at the time. "In truth there exists no I-Thou, but only Thou, spoken to God, of which the I is but an echo" (see Schaeder, Briefwechsel, vol. 2, pp 131-34, also Horwitz and Buber, Buber’s Way to “I and Thou,” trans. Horwitz, 1988: 187). As Rosenzweig had noted, Buber did not yet grasp the reality of speech until 1923 (Rosenzweig, Briefe, 414). 31 Rosenstock-Huessy, Practical Knowledge of the Soul, 14. 32 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 184, 185, 187. 33 Franz Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999; written in 1921), 99103. 34 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 223-24. Also in Eugen RosenstockHuessy, “The Future Way of Life,” Rosenstock-Huessy Papers, Volume 1 (Norwich, Vt.: 1981), 8. 35 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 67-68. 36 The messianic theory of knowledge … [,] which ranks weighs truths according to the price of their verification and the bond that they institute among human beings, cannot however lead beyond the two for all-time irreconcilable expectations of the Messiah: of the coming (kommende) and of the coming again (wiederkommende)…. Earthly (irdischen) truth remains therefore split, – divided as the extra-divine factuality, as the primal facts of world and humanity (Gesammelte Schriften III, 159). 37 Rosenstock-Huessy, Practical Knowledge of the Soul, 50, 53. 38 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 192. 39 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 199-202. 40 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 577. 41 Rosenstock-Huessy, Practical Knowledge of the Soul, 59. 42 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 31-41. 43 See Franz Rosenzweig, Ninety-two Poems and Hymns by Yehuda Halevi, trans. Thomas Kovach, Eva Jospe, & Gilya Gerda Schmidt (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1999) 259; also Franz Rosenzweig and Nahum Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, 350-51. Cf. also Richard A. Cohen, Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 25. 44 Rosenzweig wrote in 1923: “My view … is that European culture today is on the verge of collapse and can only be saved if super-European, super-human powers come to its aid. I have no illusion about these powers, among which Judaism is one: they will in turn become Europeanized and secularized anew precisely if their aid succeeds; indeed, I am aware that the very first stage of help is also the first stage towards a new secularization. The eternity of these powers proves itself in

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the ability to secularize again and again (Die Ewigkeit der Mächte bewährt sich in ihrer Fähigkeit, sich immer neu zu säkularisieren).” Gesammelte Schriften I, 889890, Franz Rosenzweig and Nahum Glatzer, His Life and Thought, 129. 45 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 122-123. 46 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 243. CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE STUBBORNNESS OF THE JEWS (ROBERT ERLEWINE) 1

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig, Judaism Despite Christianity: The “Letters on Christianity and Judaism” between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig, ed. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (New York: Schocken Books, 1969). 2 Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Franz Rosenzweig and the Crisis of Historicism,” in Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 312. 3 Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig, Judaism Despite Christianity, 94. 4 For a fascinating take on the role of history in Kant’s thought, particularly as manifested in his famous essay, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?,” see Michel Foucault’s “What is Enlightenment,” in Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 32-50. Foucault claims that “this little text is located in a sense at the crossroads of critical reflection and reflection on history.” Foucault goes on to suggest that this is perhaps “the first time that a philosopher has connected …closely and from the inside, the significance of his work with respect to knowledge, a reflection on history and a particular analysis of the specific moment at which he is writing” (38). For a more sustained discussion of Kant’s relationship to history see Yirmyahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). 5 Immanuel Kant, Foundations in the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis White Beck (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, Inc.), 50. 6 On the social dimension of Kant’s account of reason, particularly as it relates to his political and religious works, see Philip J. Rossi, The Social Authority of Reason: Kant’s Critique, Radical Evil, and The Destiny of Humankind, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), and Sharon Anderson-Gold, Unnecessary Evil: History and Moral Progress in the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). 7 Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers: 1960), 94. 8 I develop Kant’s position vis-à-vis revelation, reason, and monotheism in significantly more detail in Monotheism and Tolerance: Recovering a Religion of Reason (Indiana University Press, forthcoming). 9 Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig, Judaism Despite Christianity, 124.

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10 Rosenzweig, “Urzelle” to the Star of Redemption,” Franz Rosenzweig: Philosophical and Theological Writings, trans. and ed. Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2000), 63. 11 For example, Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption opens with “All Cognition of the All [that is, philosophy] originates in death, in the fear of death.” Franz Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 3. 12 Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, 94. 13 To be sure, Kant also has a dialectical notion of history, but it is rooted in the development of reason, and the gradual rationalization of human history. On this, see Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History; Rossi, The Social Authority of Reason; and Anderson-Gold, Unnecessary Evil. 14 For example, Emmanuel Levinas, perhaps the most influential reader of Rosenzweig, while differing from both Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig on several issues, nevertheless continues a version—albeit a rather idiosyncratic one—of philosophically interrogating revelation. Levinas’s works in this matter have exerted a profound influence on the landscape of French thought, particularly in the field of phenomenology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For an interesting collection of diverse perspectives on the role of religion in phenomenology, see Dominique Janicaud, Jean-François Courtine, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, and Paul Ricoeur, Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate (New York: Fordam University Press, 2000). 15 I will distinguish between “fact” of religious pluralism, as a facet of our existential human condition in the modern / post-modern world from the “value” of religious pluralism, which treats all religions as equally veridical and therefore as equally worthy of respect. This is not to say that this “fact” did not exist prior to modernity, but it is felt with more acuity today in the wake of globalization and the large-scale breakdown of traditional structures of religious authority. 16 On this point, see Chapter 7, “The Social Contract and Jewish-Christian Relations” in David Novak, The Jewish Social Contract: An Essay in Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 188-217. 17 Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig, Judaism Despite Christianity, 113. 18 Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig, Judaism Despite Christianity, 125. 19 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future or The Modern Mind Outrun, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1966), 10. 20 M. Darrol Bryant, “The Grammar of the Spirit: Time, Speech and Society,” Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy: Studies in His Life and Thought, ed. M. Darrol Bryant and Hans R. Huessy (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1986), 244. 21 Wayne Cristaudo, “Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta. http: plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/rosenstock-huessy/, Fall 2008. 19. 22 Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future,10. 23 Wayne Cristaudo, “Rosenstock-Huessy,” 20.

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24 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man (Norwich, Vt: Argo Books, 1969), 469. 25 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 473. 26 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 61-62. 27 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 62. 28 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 748. 29 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 749. 30 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 82. 31 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 216. 32 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 225-26. 33 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 20. 34 Or more particularly, the absorption of the Jews into Christendom with the Emancipation of the Jews following the French Revolution. See Out of Revolution, 216-237. 35 Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 130. 36 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 343. 37 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 235-37. 38 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 335-36. 39 Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking,” Franz Rosenzweig: Philosophical and Theological Writings, 132. 40 To be sure, Rosenstock-Huessy in The Christian Future moves further in this direction, arguing that his notion of Christianity is sufficiently broad to incorporate such figures as the Buddha and Lao-Tse, as “the cross is not an exclusive symbol of the egoism of one group; it is the inclusive symbol of the reunification of man,” and that it is time for China and India (which is much like his vision of the Jews in a sense) to leave behind their “religious and political stagnation” and join humanity by being “shot through with the Christian power of death and resurrection” (Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 174). However, this is hardly the sufficient reckoning between philosophy and theology I am looking for. 41 This is developed in chapter 1 of my forthcoming Monotheism and Tolerance: Recovering a Religion of Reason. 42 John Hick, God Has Many Names (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1980), 75. 43 Dan Cohn-Sherbok, “Judaism and Other Faiths,” The Myth of Religious Superiority: A Multifaith Exploration, ed. Paul F. Knitter (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005). 44 Dan Cohn-Sherbok, “Judaism and Other Faiths,” 126. 45 It should be pointed out that neither Hick nor Cohn-Sherbok accepts historicism, but instead they insist there is veridicality to religious claims. However, for Hick and Cohn-Sherbok, one escapes the “crisis of historicism” not through the revelation of any one tradition, but through a careful dialogical process with other religions. Through this process, one comes to understand that revelation is a dialectical process involving both transcendence and human projection. However, Hick, who has pioneered this method, is unable to provide anything beyond vague accounts of all religions accomplishing similar goals. For a devastating critique of

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Hick on this matter, see Keith Ward’s essay, “Truth and Diversity of Religions,” The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity, ed. Philip L. Quinn and Kevin Meeker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 111-112. 46 Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig, Judaism Despite Christianity, 129. 47 Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking,” Philosophical and Theological Writings, 130-31. 48 Leora Batnitzky, Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered (Princeton, NJ: 2000), 22-23. 49 Franks and Morgan, Franz Rosenzweig: Philosophical and Theological Writings, 138. 50 Menachem Meiri, Bet ha-Behirah, Avodah Zarah 15b, Bava Kama, 113a-b, cited in The Jewish Political Tradition, II: Membership, ed. Michael Walzer, et al. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 503-505. 51 Hick, God Has Many Names, 24.

CHAPTER TWELVE: SPEECH IS THE BODY OF THE SPIRIT (HAROLD M. STAHMER) 1

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy was born the son of a Jewish banking family in Berlin, Germany on July 6, 1888. He was educated at the universities of Zurich, Berlin, and Heidelberg and received his doctorate in law in 1909 (Heidelberg) and his Ph.D. in 1923 (Heidelberg). He converted to Christianity at age 18 or 19. From 1912 until 1914 he was lecturer in law at Leipzig and served in the German army as an officer from 1914 to 1918. In 1919 he edited a factory newspaper for Daimler Benz and in 1921 directed the Academy of Labor in Frankfurt. In 1923 he was appointed professor of law and sociology at Breslau, where he served until January 31, 1933. From 1933 until 1936 he taught at Harvard, and from 1935 until his retirement in 1957 he was professor of social philosophy at Dartmouth. In 1927 he founded the German School for Adult Education and in 1929 was elected Vice President of the World Association for Adult Education. In 1940 he helped found Camp William James in Vermont, an experimental leadership training center for the CCC. He is the author of more than 450 essays, articles, and monographs, including 45 books. About 150 of his lectures were recorded. He died on February 24, 1973, in Norwich, Vermont. 2 A discourse on Rosenstock-Huessy is a fitting contribution to a celebration of the life and work of Walter J. Ong, S.J. Both men responded to the power of speech and dedicated their own lives, albeit in different ways, to revealing for humankind the mysteries of the Incarnate Word. I have been privileged to know both men and wish to express my indebtedness to Father Ong, whom I first met in 1957 and whose research and generous spirit have provided me with a constant source of intellectual and spiritual nourishment. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Bibliography / Biography (New York: Four Wells, 1959), 24.

Notes

3

389

Cf. Wilfred Rohrbach, Das Sprachdenken Rosenstock-Huessys (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1973), and Harold M. Stahmer, “Speak That I May See Thee!”: The Religious Significance of Language (New York: Macmillan, 1968). 4 Hamann to F.H. Jacobi (11.14.1784); Hamann to Herder (8.6-10.1784); Hamann to Jacobi (3.4-10.1788). Cf. W.M. Alexander, Johann Georg Hamann: Philosophy and Faith, (The Hague, 1966), pp. 133-134. “}Hamann’s use of the term ‘language’ (Sprache) is sometimes highly figurative: frequently he has in mind not only human expression, but the divine self-expression (the LOGOS) which lies at the ground of it. We use ‘word’ for the self-expression of God by which man communicates with his fellow-man (on which human society and even human existence itself rises), and for the mediating organ between our invisible souls and our visible bodies. For Hamann this is not a semantic accident but a clue as to the place to investigate the divine mystery of man, both the nature of his powers and the misuse of these powers.” 5 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, ed. Judaism Despite Christianity (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1969), 119. 6 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, I Am an Impure Thinker, (Norwich, Vt.: Argo, 1970), vii. 7 Walter J. Ong, S.J., “Philosophical Sociology” (The Modern Schoolman, XXXVII, January, 1960), 138-140. 8 Eugen Rosenstock, Ostfalens Rechtsliteratur unter Friedrich II (Weimar: Verlag Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1912), 144. Cf. also Ja und Nein: Autobiographische Fragmente, (Heidelberg, 1968), pp. 62-63. 9 Rosenstock-Huessy, Ja und Nein, 63. 10 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Bibliography / Biography, 17. 11 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution (New York: William Morrow, 1938) 708. 12 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 5. 13 Rosenstock, Huessy, Out of Revolution, 6. 14 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 740-41. 15 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Bibliography / Biography, 16. 16 Konrad von Moltke and Eckart Wilkens, “On Law and Language,” unpublished paper delivered at the conference on “Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy: His Life and Work” at Renison College, Waterloo, Canada, June 6-9, 1982. The reader may also be interested in a recent work by one of Rosenstock-Huessy’s first students at Dartmouth College, Professor Harold Berman, whose ideas were significantly influenced by Rosenstock-Huessy’s work on revolutions. 17 von Moltke and Wilkens, “On Law and Language,” 4. 18 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “Ruckblick auf die Kreatur”, in Deutsche Beiträge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947) 209-10, Cf. also Stahmer, “‘Speechletters’ and ‘Speech-thinking’,” Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen RosenstockHuessy", (Modern Judaism, vol. 4, Number 1, February 1984), 61-62. The works that Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig produced during this period were actually responses to the fundamentally human and social issues which they experienced. Hence, Rosenzweig’s remark, “The dialogue which these

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monologues make between one another I consider the whole truth”. Other related works produced during this period include Buber’s Ich und Du (I and Thou) (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1923); Ferdinand Ebner, Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten (The Word and the Spiritual Realities) (Innsbruck: BrennerVerlag,1921); Hans Ehrenberg, Disputation: I, Fichte (Munich: Drei Masken Verlag,1923); Theodor Litt, Individuum und Gemeinschaft (Individual and Community) (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1923); Friedrich Gogarten, Ich glaube an den dreieinigen Gott (I believe in the three-in one God), (Jena: E. Diedrichs, 1926); Karl Lowith, Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen (The Individual in the Role of the Fellowman) (Munich: Drei Masken Verlag, 1928); Eberhard Grisebach, Gegenwart (The Present) (Halle: Niemeyer, 1928); and lastly Gabriel Marcel, Journal métaphysique (Paris: Gallimard, 1927). Two additional works which deal with some of these same concerns, but from a nonreligious and more philosophical perspective, are Max Scheler, Wesen und Formen der Sympathie (The Nature and Forms of Sympathy) (Bonn: F. Cohen, 1923) and Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) (Halle: M. Niemoller,1927). 19 Made available to the author by Mrs. Freya von Moltke. 20 Cf. Franz Rosenzweig, Kleinere Schriften (Berlin: Schocken, 1937); Rosenzweig, Zweistromland. Kleine Schriften zu Glauben und Denken (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984). Also Nahum Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought (New York: Schocken, 1953); Bernard Martin, Great 20th Century Jewish Philosophers (New York: Macmillan, 1970); Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity; and Stahmer, Speak That I May See Thee!” 106-182. 21 Nahum Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, 198-99. 22 Eugen Rosen-stock-Huessy, Ja und Nein: Autobiographische Fragmente, 70. 23 Rosenstock-Huessy, Ja und Nein, 169. 24 Franz Rosenzweig, Briefe, (Berlin: 1973), pp. 384-85. 25 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Ja und Nein: Autobiographische Fragmente, p. 169. 26 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts, vol. 2 (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1964), 451. 27 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Ja und Nein: Autobiographische Fragmente, p. 172. 28 Nahum Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, 200. 29 Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 72. 30 Fritz Kaufman, “Karl Jaspers and a Philosophy of Communication,” The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (New York: Open Court, 1957), 210-295. 31 Rosenzweig, Briefe, 638. 32 Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 172, also 71-76, 171-77; Ja und Nein, 70-72, 107-118, 166-172. 33 Rosenstock-Huessy, Ja und Nein, 70-72, 107-118, 161, 166-172. 34 Rosenstock-Huessy, Ja und Nein, 168. 35 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Soziologie I: Die Übermacht der Räume (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1956), 11-14. 36 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality (Norwich, Vt: Argo Books, 1970), 8-11.

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37

Rosenstock-Huessy, Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts, 756. Rosenstock-Huessy, Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts, 761. 39 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 16. 40 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 16. 41 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 18. 42 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 20-21. 43 Rosenstock-Huessy, Bibliography / Biography, 22-23. 44 Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future, 94. 45 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 727-28. 46 Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future, 127. 47 Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future, 124 and 130. 48 Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future,108. 49 Amos Wilder, The Language of the Gospel (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 26-27. 50 Wilder, The Language of the Gospel, 28. 51 Wilder, The Language of the Gospel, 18. Cf. Ernst Fuchs, “Die Sprache im Neuen Testament,” Zur Frage nach dem historischen Jesus (Tubingen: 1960), 261. 38

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: GRAMMAR ON THE CROSS (PETER J. LEITHART) 1

Fergus Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein, rev. ed. (London: SPCK, 1997). Kevin Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in this Text? (Apollos, 1998); First Theology: God, Scripture, and Hermeneutics (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2002); The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005). Michael Horton also employs speech-act theory in his Covenant and Eschatology: The Divine Drama (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002). 3 After Enlightenment: Hamann as Post-Secular Visionary (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2008); “Enlightenment Revisited: Hamann as the First and Best Critic of Kant’s Philosophy,” Modern Theology 20 (2004): 291-301; “Hamann’s London Writings: The Hermeneutics of Trinitarian Condescension,” Pro Ecclesia 14 (2005): 191-234. See also John Milbank, “The Linguistic Turn as a Theological Turn,” in The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, and Culture (London: Blackwell, 1997), chap. 4. 4 The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2000); Speech and Theology: Language and the Logic of Incarnation (London: Routledge Press, 2002); Jacques Derrida: Live Theory (Continuum, 2005). 5 For example, see Anthony Thiselton, Two Horizons (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1980); New Horizons in Hermeneutics (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1992). 6 George Allen Morgan, Speech and Society: The Christian Linguistic Social Philosophy of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (University of Florida Press, 1987). 2

392

7

Notes

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality (Norwich, Vt.: Argo Books, 1969), 9, 18. 8 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 20. 9 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 21. 10 See note 9. 11 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 19. 12 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 24. 13 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Origin of Speech (Norwich, Vt.: Argo Books, 1981), 40: “Anybody who reads the first chapter of Genesis or the last chapter of Revelation can test our assertion that Greek logic is discarded in favor of a logic in which all the sentences, Give answer May I have an answer You have answered me He answers hold equal rank.” 14 Rosenstock-Huessy, Origin of Speech, 42. Rosenstock-Huessy is emphatic about the involvement of the speaker in his speech. One cannot speak at all without changing himself, as well as his listeners, a fact, Rosenstock-Huessy observes, that all propagandists forget. See George Allen Morgan, Speech and Society (Gainesville, Fla.: University of Florida Press, 1987), 3. 15 Rosenstock-Huessy, Origin of Speech, 43. 16 Rosenstock-Huessy, Origin of Speech, 44. 17 For a discussion of some aspects of this paradigm, see Peter J. Leithart, “The Cross of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy,” unpublished paper. 18 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 12. 19 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 13. 20 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 12-13. 21 See note 19. 22 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 14. 23 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 14-15. Rosenstock-Huessy gives a more thorough treatment of this in the opening chapter of The Origin of Speech. There he acknowledges that reducing great social crises to “failures of speech” may appear to be a trivialization. But he responds by suggesting that these problems seem bigger than speech precisely because the “plenitude of speech” has dried up (p. 17), and that if speech were to be renewed, the social evils would be recognizable for what they are—speech crises. He also makes the argument that the solutions point to the nature of the disease: Wars are remedied by listening, revolutions by re-formulating, economic crises by trust, and decadence by new representatives (p. 17). 24 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 16. 25 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Practical Knowledge of the Soul (Norwich, Vt.: Argo Books, 1988), 16. 26 Rosenstock-Huessy, Practical Knowledge of the Soul, 16. 27 See note 26.

Notes

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393

Rosenstock-Huessy, Practical Knowledge of the Soul, 17. See note 28. 30 George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville, Ky.: WestminsterJohn Knox Press, 1984). 31 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 100. 32 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 108. 33 See note 31. 34 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 101. 35 See note 34. 36 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 102. 37 See note 36. 38 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 103. 39 See note 38. 40 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 104. 41 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 106. 42 See note 41. 43 See note 41. 44 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 107. 45 See note 44. 46 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 109. 47 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 111. Rosenstock-Huessy reinforces this point by introducing a fourth focus of discussion, the plural “we.” By uttering “we,” we establish unity between speaker and listener, and this is the driving force of history: “All history is the tale of acts in which some speaker and some listener become one.” History is only history if it is “the inside story of a We group” (Speech and Reality, 109). In part, Rosenstock-Huessy is arguing that human beings can have a sense of a unified history only through telling history as a series of “we” events. When history is told in the third person, it proliferates: “‘They’ can be said of any group and nation, big or small. Harlem has a history, the Bronx has a history, Manhattan has a history, it would appear. The subdivisions of a thirdperson-history crave multiplication” into a multicultural extravaganza (Speech and Reality, 110). Earlier historians didn’t write third-person history; Thucydides, Tacitus, Gregory of Tours, and Voltaire each “felt himself a faithful child of history which he tried to rewrite as ‘our history.’” (Speech and Reality,110). 48 The Christian Future: Or, the Modern Mind Outrun (New York: Charles Scribner’s & Sons, 1946; reprint, San Francisco: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), 7 49 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 8. 50 See note 49. 51 Rosenstock-Huessy, Origin of Speech, 34. 52 Rosenstock-Huessy, Origin of Speech, 35. 53 Rosenstock-Huessy, Origin of Speech, 34-35. 54 Rosenstock-Huessy, Practical Knowledge of the Soul, 17. 55 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 47-48. 56 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 48. 57 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 49. 29

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58

See note 57. Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 50. 60 See note 59. 61 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 52. 62 Adjectives, Rosenstock-Huessy claims, describe unfamiliar new things in familiar terms. What is that, we ask wonderingly? And we can arrive at an answer by noting that it is big, red, hairy, and sharp-toothed. 63 Verbs speak of an unfinished world, of a world in process, and thus point to the future. 64 Rosenstock-Huessy, Origin of Speech, 69. 65 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 18. 66 See note 66. 67 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 55. 68 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 64. 69 See note 67. 70 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 56. 71 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “Man Must Teach,” in Rosenstock-Huessy Papers, Volume I (Norwich, Vt.: Argo Books, 1981). 72 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 58. 73 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 59. 74 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 61. 75 See note 74. 76 See note 74. 77 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 62. 78 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 189. 79 See note 78. 80 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 190. 81 See note 80. 59

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: GOETHE, CHURCH (MATTHEW DEL NEVO) 1

THE

FIRST FATHER

OF THE

THIRD AGE

OF THE

Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara Galli (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 303. 2 According to Peter Leithart, Harold Stahmer traces Rosenstock-Huessy's notion of a “Johannine” age to Schelling: “In Schelling's Philosophy of Revelation . . . the millenarian idea of the successive ‘ages’ of the world—the Petrine, the Pauline, and finally the Johannine—is developed at length. These ages were linked by Schelling to three historic forms of Christianity: the Petrine age to Roman Catholicism, the Pauline to Protestantism, and the Johannine age (that is, the Age of the Spirit), to a new era marked by an absence of doctrinal and dogmatic concerns.” For Rosenstock-Huessy, “the Johannine age would be an age ruled by the Word, and traditional barriers between the sacred and the profane would be

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eliminated,” as Christians “immigrate into our workaday world, there to incarnate the spirit in unpredictable forms” (a prophecy of Surnaturel, or Bonhoeffer?). They believed that in the new age “the New Jerusalem” would bring “healing of the nations without any visible Church at its center.” Yet, where Schelling saw the Johannine age as an age of the Spirit, Rosenstock-Huessy characterized it as an age of the word (cited from leithart.com/archives/002720.php [accessed 18.11.08]). 3 Del Nevo, “Pentecostalism and the Three Ages of the Church” Australasian Pentecostal Studies 10 (2006-7) 25-34. (This work is also available online: http://aps.webjournals.org/issues.asp?index=342&id={EBDF148E-91E1-4A509D03-3595014F76B8}). 4 Of course there are lines of continuity, but my thesis emphasizes what I believe are more significant discontinuities and differences. 5 Clark H. Pinnock, Flame of Love: A Theology of the Holy Spirit (Downers Grove, Ill.: Inter-Varsity Press, 1996) 131. 6 See Del Nevo, “Pentecostalism and the Age of Interpretation” Australasian Pentecostal Studies 11 (2008) 34-51 (This work is also available online http://aps.webjournals.org/default.asp?id={EBDF148E-91E1-4A50-9D033595014F76B8}) 7 Donald W. Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 1991). 8 Amos Yong, The Spirit Poured out on All Flesh (Grand Rapids Mich.: Baker Academic, 2005) See especially chap. 3. 9 Matthew Del Nevo, “Pentecostalism and the Age of Interpretation,” (2008) 3451. (Also available online: http://aps.webjournals.org/default.asp?id={EBDF148E91E1-4A50-9D03-3595014F76B8}) And see Gianni Vattimo, discussion of Verwindung in Heidegger. “… it indicates a going-beyond that is both an acceptance and a deepening,” in “Nihilism and the Postmodern in Philosophy” in The End of Modernity (Baltimore, Md.: John Hopkins Press, 1991), 172. 10 Franz Rosenzweig, The New Thinking, trans. Alan Udoff and Barbara Galli (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991). 11 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 293. 12 Goethe’s prayer is that of the Jewish people according to the Prayerbook. At evening prayer Orthodox Jews pray after the Shema, “May the blessing of the Lord be upon us. Establish for us the work of our hands. Establish the work of our hands.” Reciting Psalm 90:17. 13 Geworfenheit, a Heideggerian neologism to express the way that we always find ourselves “thrown,” as it were, in a world of meaning, of word, and of ideas and practices. We do not think from pure subjectivity, or pure reason or consciousness, but out of our thrown condition. 14 I allude here to Nietzsche’s important saying in Also Sprach Zarathustra (Prologue §.6), which moreover derives from Christianity (Mark 8:34-37; and John 12: 24-45): “What is great in man is this: that he is a bridge and not a purpose; and what is loveable about man is, that he is a crossing-over (Übergang) and a descent (Untergang).” Nietzsche is playing on words. Übergang as in crossing a bridge, but also in the sense of transition, from lower species to higher species; it is to this

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extent that man is capable of creating something beyond himself. In biblical terms man—that is, a person—is an “in-between” creature, not a species in the Aristotelian or Thomist sense; in between angel and beast, saint and monster. Nietzsche, like Moses and Jesus in their different ways, is affirming the upward path of life (Deuteronomy 30:19; John14:6). Untergang has the connotation of going down like the sun; but also, of going down to death, as well as going down to the source. 15 Heidegger describes the phenomenon of “process” thinking as projected objectification of man and the world, therefore as a further expression of Cartesian modernism. See ‘The Age of the World Picture’ in Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Colophon, 1977), 115ff. 16 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 294. 17 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 295. 18 Berdyaev, Put 50 (1936) 3-26. 19 Berdyaev, Put 50 (1936) 3-26. 20 See note 17. 21 See note 17. 22 Some of his more insightful friends (for example, Friedrich Schiller) intended admiration rather than disparagement, but again for the wrong reasons–thinking of the pagan Greek rather than the secular Christian. 23 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 301. 24 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 12, (Zurich: Artemis, 1949), 605. All translations from the Werke in this chapter are by Jürgen Lawrenz, the Leibniz scholar. 25 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 295. 26 Wanderjahre is, in its overt sense, a term used to identify the extension of apprenticeship into adulthood, for which the exact English equivalent is the (now obsolete) “journeyman’s years.” The peregrinations of an adult in search of wide experience is the trail toward eventual mastership or mastery, and this is the true point of the Wanderjahre. 27 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister, 67. 28 “Sentimental” was the buzzword of the age; cf. Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey. It devoted a kind of superficial concept of emotion-driven selfhood and was really a means of escaping the hard task of finding your true self—something becoming a fashion again in today’s ironical age, albeit with different words! 29 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister, 67-68. 30 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister, 68. 31 Johann Lavater (1741-1801) a Zurich theologian, pastor, and scientist. Wolfgang Goethe, Poetry and Truth (Collected Works, vol. 4), trans. Robert R. Heitner (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), Book Fourteen, 446. 32 Goethe, Werke, Band 5 Dichtung und Wahrheit, (Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag) 249 Poetry and Truth, 209. 33 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 12, (Zurich: Artemis-Verlag, 1949), 606. 34 Goethe: “The streets lined with those fine houses are kept clean, and everyone on them behaves quite decorously; but behind those walls affairs may be in great

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disorder, and many a smooth exterior is merely a thin layer of plaster over a rotting pile which can collapse overnight with a more than usually startling effect, since this occurs in the midst of a peaceful situation.” Poetry and Truth, bk. 7, 216. 35 Emil Ludwig, Goethe, Geschichte eines Menschen, (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 1931), 326. 36 Ludwig, Goethe, 176. 37 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister vol. 5, bk. 2, chap. 1, 12. 38 See note 37. This is perfectly Rosenzweigian. 39 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister, vol.5, bk. 2, chap. 1,13. 40 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister, vol. 5, bk. 2, chap. 1, 14. 41 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister, vol. 5, bk. 2, chap. 1, 14. 42 Goethe, like most of us, has basically grown out of old-fashioned organized church Christianity. It is merely a cultural relic of the past, but he is no iconoclast; he leaves those for whom it is saving to be saved by it; but he knows, as today many of us also realize, consciously or not, that this old church Christianity cannot save us. We need a Church that keeps God real. 43 Cited by Jaroslav Pelikan, Faust the Theologian (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 19. 44 Cited by Pelikan, Faust the Theologian (n. 807), 19. 45 Faust the Theologian, 19. 46 Faust the Theologian, 19. 47 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister, vol. 5, bk. 2, chap. 1, 12. 48 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister, vol. 5, bk. 2, chap. 1, 13. 49 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister, vol. 5 , bk. 2, chap. 1, 14. 50 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister, vol. 5, bk. 2, chap. 2,15. 51 See note 47. 52 Faust, concluding scene. 53 In the Johannine Church the difference between man and woman qua these soul matters is seen in practice; at the same time, woman is released and free to find her God-given destiny and is not reduced to inferior status (to say the least) as in the Petrine and Pauline churches. 54 Meyendorff, cited by Kenneth Leech in Experiencing God: Theology as Spirituality (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 240. 55 To understand this better, see Vladimir Lossky on the Palamite synthesis in The Vision of God, chap. 9, trans. Asheleigh Moorhouse (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary, 1983) This book is a series of masterful lectures Lossky gave at the Sorbonne in 1945-1946. 56 Goethe, Poetry and Truth, bk. 7, 219. 57 Goethe, Poetry and Truth, bk. 7, 218. 58 Goethe, Poetry and Truth, bk. 8, 254. 59 Goethe, Poetry and Truth, 465-466. 60 Goethe, Poetry and Truth, 468. 61 Spinoza, having dissociated man from the doctrine of substance in Proposition 10, adds: “…the essence of man is constituted by definite modifications of God.”

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(Corollary to Proposition 10), Ethics, trans. Samuel Shirley (New York: Hackett, 1982), 69. 62 Goethe, Poetry and Truth, bk. 14, 459. 63 Spinoza, Ethics, 185. 64 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, trans. W. Hallo (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971), 286. 65 Walter Kaufmann, “Goethe and the History of Ideas,” in From Shakespeare to Existentialism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980). 53. The last part of this quotation: “In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister” [Mastery comes from knowing your limitations] is one of Goethe’s aphorisms that is now the common property of the world. 66 Kaufmann, “Goethe and the History of Ideas,” 55. 67 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 302. 68 For example, like that phrase in one of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (n. 9), “…wisse das Bild” (“make the image yours” in C. F. MacIntyre’s translation), which is a new semantic construct so mind-bending it would need a whole essay to translate. 69 Goethe, Urworte, trans. Jürgen Lawrenz. 70 Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, trans. David Webb (Stanford Ca: Stanford University Press, 1997) 51. 71 More secular because Pentecostalism is a secularising experience in its foundation “after metaphysics.” But for introductory and basic comments on the relation of Pentecostalism and secularism see Del Nevo, “Pentecostalism and the Age of Interpretation” Australasian Pentecostal Studies 11 (2008) 34-51 (Also available online at: http://aps.webjournals.org/default.asp?id={EBDF148E-91E14A50-9D03-3595014F76B8}) 72 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 116. 73 Rosenzweig, Franz Rosenzweig’s “The New Thinking” trans. Alan Udoff & Barbara E. Galli (Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999) 67-102. 74 Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005) 247. 75 See Nicolas Berdyaev, Truth and Revelation, trans. R. M. French (New York: Collier books, 1962) and the Berdyaev anthology: Berdyaev, Christian Existentialism, A Berdyaev Synthesis, Selected and trans. Donald A. Lowrie (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965). Lowrie worked closely with Berdyaev for 25 years up to the latter’s death in 1948. See also my further contextualisation of Berdyaev, Del Nevo, “Toward the Philosophical Foundations of “Pentecostal Ecclesiology” Inter. Romanian Review for Theological and Religious Studies. II, 1-2 (2008) 168-182. 76 This is why oneness Pentecostalism is an interesting and relevant phenomenon and all Pentecostalism partakes of it in practice, if not theologically. If the Spirit is abroad, diversifying the Church in optimal and unfathomable and unpredictable ways, then it is under the Name above all Names, the Name of Jesus Christ. The attempt to read Oneness Pentecostalism in terms of Trinitarian theology is misguided. Pentecostalism is post-metaphysical Trinitarianism, which has never

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been written about, yet, except possibly Berdyaev, and perhaps Dietrich Bonhoeffer. 77 See Max Scheler, Ressentiment, trans. William W. Holdheim (Milwaukee, Wisc.: Marquette University Press, 1994) as a good exposé. CHAPTER FIFTEEN: CRITIQUE OF KARL BARTH (WAYNE CRISTAUDO) 1

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “Der Selbstmord Europas,” (“The Suicide of Europe”) Hochland 16, Bd. 2, Monatsschrift für alle Gebiete des Wissens, der Literatur und Kunst, ed. Karl Muth (September 1919}: 529-553. Letter from Barth to Thurneysen: October 28, 1919. Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen, Briefwechsel Bd. 1 1913-1921 (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1973), 348. 2 The original correspondence is in the Karl Barth archives in Basel, Switzerland, but the Rosenstock-Huessy Archive in Bielefeld, Germany,also has copies. 3 Rosenstock to Barth, November 18, 1919. 4 Thurneysen says to Barth in a letter of March 18, 1920: “I really don’t like this turmoil: of the pastor-woman-Catholic-Protestant, of war-Germany-fate-church– fraternity–love is written without the assured connection of what has become knowledge.” Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen, Briefwechsel Bd. 1 1913-1921 (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1973), 375. And on March 24, 1920, he tells Barth that they do not want to be swallowed up by the Patmos people nor let themselves be identified with them. I think Thurneysen’s formulation of the concerns and mood of Patmos is a very good one, just as I think the picture of knowledge as offering a kind of serenity reveals what Rosenstock-Huessy would see as a kind of blindness. 5 The letter is published in Tumult, 20 (Eugen Moritz Friedrich RosenstockHuessy, 1888-1973), ed. Frank Böckelmann, Dietmar Kamper, Walter Seitter (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 1995), 9-15. 6 Tumult, 10. 7 Tumult, 11. Elsewhere in the same letter he says that Barth stands completely in the sequence of Pierre Abélard, Giordano Bruno, and Immanuel Kant. 8 The translation is by Raymond-Huessy, who has kindly made available his publication of this essay to the Rosenstock-Huessy discussion group. For the German, see Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Joseph Wittig, Das Alter der Kirche, Bd. 1, (Münster: Agenda Verlag, 1998, ed. Fritz Herrenbrück and Michael Gormann-Thelen; orig. Berlin: Lambert Schneider Verlag, 1927), 140. 9 Of course, Rosenzweig’s entire rationale of the eternity of the Jewish people meant that he could not accept that Zionism was the natural or necessary vehicle of the Jewish people. He did somewhat shift his position on Zionism by accepting that if Jews wished to live in Palestine, that was their entitlement. But it, for him, had nothing to do with what is essential to being Jewish. 10 Tumult, 10. 11 Tumult, 11.

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See note 11. Rosenstock-Huessy, Die Gesetze der christlichen Zeitrechnung, Rudolf Hermeier and Jochen Lübbers (Münster: Agenda Verlag, 2004), 280. 14 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1969), 104. 15 See Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “Faculty Address on ‘The Potential Christians of the Future’,” (unpublished, 1941). Available on Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Collected Works on DVD (Essex, Vt.: Argo Books, 2005). 16 Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture (Waco, Texas: American Society of Church History, 1946): 248-249. 17 Pentecost and Mission,” The Hartford Seminar Foundation Bulletin, Winter 1954/55, no. 18. On the specific issue of Balthasar (see especially Der Atem des Geistes, pp. 285ff.) and Barth he points our that in order to respond properly to Barth’s accusation that “Rome is anti-Christian,” this Jesuit had to cease being a Jesuit. He did not refute Barth; rather, he showed that “Catholics do not give too much emphasis to the analogia esti, to the natural goodness of the creature.” p. 22. 18 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “Pentecost and Mission,” 1954. In Collected Works on DVD (Essex, Vt.: Argo Books, 2005). 19 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Franz Rosenzweig zum 25. Dezember 1926. Glueckwuensche zum 40. Geburtstag. Published on the Centenary of Franz Rosenzweig’s birth. (New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1987), item 32. It is a reflection on a sentence from Franz Rosenzweig, “The Spirit of Man Is the Holy Spirit,” Zweistromland, 1926: 229. 20 The only comment we have by Rosenstock-Huessy on Hayek appears in his undated lecture “Neue Tendenzen Demokratischen Denkens,” n.d., Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Collected Works on DVD (Essex, Vt.: Argo Books, 2005) It is clear from the lecture that Rosenstock-Huessy is quite open on economics, and he thinks (wrongly) that Keynes had solved the problem of unemployment. He shows in this lecture that he is not hostile to Hayek, but he thinks that to describe contemporary economies as if they could be simply left to the market is mistaken. My point does not disagree with him on this. It is also obvious from the lecture that Rosenstock-Huessy is wary of massive technological schemes and excessive faith in planning. Politically Rosenstock-Huessy does not fit into any particular schema, though he was an admirer of Roosevelt. In Planetary Service, he talks of Roosevelt having entrusted him with training Civilian Conservation Corps leaders at Camp William James. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Planetary Service, trans. Mark Huessy and Freya von Moltke (Norwich, Vt.: Argo Books, 1978), 47. 21 Tumult, 12. 22 See note 21. 23 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution (New York: William Morrow, 1938; reprint Norwich, Vt.: Argo Books, 1969; reprint Providence, R.I.: Berg Publishers, 1993) 16. 24 Der Atem des Geistes, p. 278. 25 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 720. 13

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401

Emil Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History: Jewish affirmations and Philosophical Reflections after Auschwitz (New York: New York University Press, 1970), 69-70. See also Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, ed. R. Bernasconi and David Wood, trans. Richard Cohen (London: Routledge, 1988), 162-164. 27 Tumult, p. 13. 28 Ja und Nein, p. 83. The critique referred to by Rosenstock-Huessy’s is the letter of Rosenzweig to Buber in 1922, December 20. After expressing disappointment that Barth only recognizes Christian revelation, he compares Barth unfavorably to Kierkegaard. “[B]ehind each paradox of Kierkegaard one senses biographical absurda, and for this reason one must credere. While behind Barth’s colossal negations one senses nothing but the wall on which they are painted, a whitewash wall, his immaculate and well-ordered life…Not that they are unbelievable; but it is, after all, an indifferent authenticity.” This translation is from Nahum Glatzer and can be found in his Introduction to Franz Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy: A View of World, Man, and God, trans. Nahum Glatzer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 33. Elsewhere he writes “After a long drought, today we have a theology, mostly protestant, that leaves nothing to be desired as to the accuracy. We have it now: that God is wholly other, that to talk about Him is to talk Him away, that we can only say what He does to us.” Franz Rosenzweig and Jehuda Halevi, pp. 204-205. 29 Ja und Nein, p. 81.The reference to 1125 is probably a (mistaken) reference to the year of Abélard’s Yes and No (it appeared in 1122). It was a work that Rosenstock-Huessy rightly saw as laying the foundation for theology as a “science.” As he says in Speech and Reality: “Theology got its name as a science to solve problems that had arisen from an unsatisfactory functioning of the Church, after 1000 years of existence…The century that preceded the coining of the new phrase ‘theology,’ had discovered the paradox as the primary obstacle to the scientific treatment of the problems of the Church. Theology is meta-logic, forcing the logic of one-line reasoning to the altitude of the paradoxes with which vital thought deals.” Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality (Norwich, Vt.: Argo Books, 1970), 39. Abélard had brought this all to head by simply placing on each side of Yes and No—a thesis and its contradiction. 30 Ja und Nein, pp. 82-83. The other major theologian with whom RosenstockHuessy took exception as regards the direction of Christianity is Emil Brunner, the theologian who provoked Barth’s No! Answer to Emil Brunner. Whereas Barth and Brunner settled into a lengthy dispute that would be widely recognized as one of the century’s most significant debates within Protestant systematics, RosenstockHuessy thought that Bruner was just as mistaken as Barth. As in his critique of Barth he sees that the hostility to the Roman Church is based on a moral stance that transports both men out of that history, extending from Christ to Luther and Calvin, and into the morally safer denizen of post-Reformation theology. But for Rosenstock-Huessy this is once again a failure to see Christianity as a process of incarnation (hence he says that if Brunner were right , “I could not teach the incarnation in history.”) Just as Barth had wished to appeal to God’s absolute

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otherness in order to separate him from the more bloody and gristly works of the church, Brunner needs to separate his moral purpose from the grounds of his existence. For Rosenstock-Huessy, as we already said above this is a fantasy, one that might make us feel better about ourselves, but only at the expense of us understanding how we became who we became. It is all part of the same atomistic/ egoic way of thinking which disconnects us from reality. Reality, for RosenstockHuessy, is always connected – from past to future and inside to outside. That’s why it is a cross, and why suffering is of its essence and why, for him, Christianity is not a theological solution to a problem, but life itself understood as the integration of time, speech, history through sacrificial love. CHAPTER SIXTEEN: LITURGICAL THINKING (DONALD E. PEASE) 1

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, ed. Judaism Despite Christianity (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1969), 32-33. 2 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality (Norwich, Vt.: Argo Books, 1970), 111. 3 Clinton C. Gardner, introduction to Speech and Reality, 6. 4 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “Liturgical Thinking. Joseph Wittig in Memoriam,” in Rosenstock-Huessy Papers, Volume 1 (Norwich, Vt.: Argo Books, 1981; reprinted from Orate Fratres 23, no.12 [November 6, 1949] and Orate Fratres 24, no. 1 [January 1950]), 12. 5 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Origin of Speech (Norwich, Vt.: Argo Books, 1981), 90. 6 Rosenstock-Huessy, “Liturgical Thinking,” 9. 7 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future, or The Modern Mind Outrun (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1946; reprint, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), 70. 8 Rosenstock-Huessy, “Liturgical Thinking,” 1. 9 Rosenstock-Huessy, “Liturgical Thinking,” 4. 10 Rosenstock-Huessy, “Liturgical Thinking,” 9. 11 Rosenstock-Huessy, “Liturgical Thinking,” 7. 12 Rosenstock-Huessy, “Liturgical Thinking,” 8. 13 Rosenstock-Huessy, “Liturgical Thinking,” 8 and 7. 14 Rosenstock-Huessy, “Liturgical Thinking,” 15. 15 Rosenstock-Huessy, “Liturgical Thinking,” 12. 16 Rosenstock-Huessy, “Liturgical Thinking,” 13. 17 See note 16. 18 See note 16. 19 Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity, 69-70. 20 Rosenstock-Huessy, “Liturgical Thinking,” 14. 21 See note 16.

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (MICHAEL ERMARTH) 1 It is utterly significant that Rosenstock-Huessy reversed the well-established IThou formula for empathic dialogue (central to Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Buber, Rosenzweig, and others) into the more radical “Thou-I” sequencing, overturning the assumed primacy and / or apriority of the I (or self) and its pre-eminent status in modern thought (as in the Cartesian cogito) and modern life in general (as the all-consuming subject of free-market capitalism). Thou-ness as otherness, possibly even godliness, always precedes recognition of I-ness, opening the way to acknowledging the Other as something truly other than Me. Rosenstock-Huessy’s Thou-I reversal encapsulates his grammatical Copernican turn toward overcoming modernity with one of its own most favorite formulations. 2 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution (Norwich, Vt.: Argo Books, 1969; originally published New York: William Morrow & Co.,1938; reprint, Providence: Berg Publishers, 1993), 524. 3 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future, or The Modern Mind Outrun (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1946; reprint New York: Harper & Row Publishers, Harper Torchbooks 1966), 33-34. 4 Nahum N. Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), Introduction, xxi. See also Franz Rosenzweig, Kleinere Schriften (Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1937), 289. 5 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 103. 6 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 13. 7 See note 5. 8 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 105. 9 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 780. 10 Rosenzweig, Kleinere Schriften, 129. 11 Rosenzweig, Kleinere Schriften 154. 12 Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. Knopf: New York 1948, p. 307. (Delete all the following): Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn erzählt von einem Freunde (Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend) (Frankfurt aM: S. Fischer Verlag, 1947), 409. 13 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 707. 14 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 166 and 62. From footnote 1 of p. 166: [The Cross of Reality] is not some symbolistic fantasy or arbitrary schematizing, but something that has grown through two thousand years. The Jesuit writer, Hans Urs von Balthasar (Die Apokolypse der Deutschen Seele, Salzburg and Leipzig, 1939, III, 434ff.) cites the authority of Origen and Augustine, in their commentaries on Ephesians 3:18 for its kindred interpretation of human existence, and even goes so far as to say, “In the philosophical object of knowledge the figure of the cross is engraved like an indelible watermark.”

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Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 75. Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 631. 17 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 70. 18 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 69. 19 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 227. 20 James Anthony Froude, The Science of History, lecture delivered February 5, 1864 at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, London., in Thomas Brackett Reed, Rossiter Johnson, Justin McCarthy, and Albert Ellery Bergh, ed., Modern Eloquence, vol. 5 (Philadelphia: John D. Morris and Company), 443. 21 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 30. 22 Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 9. 23 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 100. 24 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 15. 25 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 16. 26 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 229. 27 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 303. 28 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 322. 29 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 42. 30 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 49. 31 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 110. 32 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 5. 33 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 227. 34 See note 33. 35 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 213. 36 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 635. 37 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 47. 38 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 221. 39 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 239. 40 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 167. 41 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 180. 42 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 136. 43 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 161. 44 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 83. 45 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 64. 46 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 96. The iteration of these five modern selfish “S’s” appears in Chap. 11, Chap. 11 “The Self-Satisfied Age” of Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (Norton: New York, 1957 [orig. 1930]), 97ff. 47 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 111; and Out of Revolution, 474. 48 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, Part Two title page, ascribed to William James. 49 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 50, 179. 50 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 125. 51 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 83. 52 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 617. 53 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 56. 16

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54

Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 248. Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 249. 56 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 80. 57 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 475. 58 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 113. 59 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 158. 60 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 627, 198, 110, 114, 119, 431. 61 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 118. 62 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 73. 63 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 84. 64 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 721. 65 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 40. 66 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 729. 67 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 13-14. 68 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 24, 103. 69 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 70ff. 70 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 19, 54. 71 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 20. 72 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 4. 73 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 136. 74 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 620. 75 Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, 7, 225. 76 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 733. 77 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 735. 78 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 118. 79 Harold J. Berman in Out of Revolution, xviii. 80 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 718. 81 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 605. 82 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 715. 83 Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 331. 55

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: EDUCATION IN THE SHADOW OF CAMP WILLIAM JAMES (CLAIRE KATZ) 1

Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1968). I have addressed Arendt’s critique of progressive education in my essay, “‘The presence of the Other is a presence that teaches’: Levinas, Pragmatism, and Pedagogy,” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, 14, no.1-2 (2006): 91-108. For contemporary discussions on Arendt’s essay and on thinking about Arendt in relationship to questions concerning education, see Hannah Arendt and Education: Renewing Our Common World, ed. Moredechai Gordon (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2001). See also in that volume the work of Natasha Levinson, Aaron Schutz, and Wendy Kohli.

406

2

Notes

One need look only to celebrities in our current culture to confirm Arendt’s point—Britney Spears, for example. Arendt herself noted the children of celebrities. There were then, just as there are now, celebrities who are children themselves: for example, Yehudi Menuhin, Shirley Temple, Judy Garland. I can only imagine the horror that Arendt would express at the proliferation of “public” space that enables very young children to expose themselves to the entire world via the Internet. If we recall the new ways that bullying now manifests itself on the Internet, we can begin to understand what Arendt means by the need to protect the privacy of young children and not expose them to political—or public—space so early in their development. 3 One of Arendt’s arguments against turning education into a public space is that we must practice self-restraint in public or political spaces. This would have the effect of stymieing education. Here I think Arendt is a bit out of touch if she believes that children in American education do not need to practice self-restraint, independent of the question of progressive education. 4 All references to Rosenstock-Huessy can be found on Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy: Collected Works on DVD (Essex, Vt.: Argo Books, 2005). 5 I must begin with a confession that I am uncomfortable using the military language / vocabulary / metaphors to describe teaching and teachers. This is the language that James uses and that Rosenstock-Huessy continues, so I will follow suit for consistency. 6 I realize that I am joining two different points in education for RosenstockHuessy—primary education and college / adult education. But I think that these two points are related. Let me also note that there are other figures: for example, Jane Addams to whom I could have turned for theoretical support for an exploration of theory and practice. 7 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Man Must Teach—1959, The Eugen RosenstockHuessy Lectures, vol. 21 (Essex, Vt.: Argo Books, 1994), 2. 8 See Man Must Teach for the reference. This is not his only reason for wanting teachers to see themselves as something other than teachers. His lecture and many of his essays take teachers colleges to task for simply training people to become teachers—rather than, for example, mathematicians with a love and knowledge of mathematics who then teach. For Rosenstock-Huessy, the teachers college has created a vacuous teacher who apparently (although he’s not even convinced of this) knows how to teach but does not know, or love, anything to teach. 9 Rosenstock-Huessy, Man Must Teach, 5-6. 10 Rosenstock-Huessy, Man Must Teach, 8. 11 See note 10. 12 Arendt, Crisis in Education, 193. 13 Arendt, Crisis in Education, 192. 14 William James, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” Leaflet 27 (New York: Association for International Conciliation, 1906; reprints, McClure’s Magazine, August 1910; The Popular Science Monthly, October 1910; Memories and Studies, London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1917, 265-296.), 275. 15 James, “Moral Equivalent of War,” Longmans edition, 277.

Notes

16

407

James, “Moral Equivalent of War,” 283: So long as anti-militarists propose no substitute for war’s disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation. And as a rule, they do fail. 17 James, “Moral Equivalent of War,” 287. 18 James, “Moral Equivalent of War,” 277-278. 19 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “Soldiers of the Impossible,” lecture at Shady Hill School. May 2, 1942. Unpublished, 12. 20 Rosenstock-Huessy, “Soldiers of the Impossible,” 9. 21 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “A Classic and a Founder” (Norwich, Vt.: Argo Books, 1981; originally a mimeograph to students, 1937; rev. ed., Frances Huessy, Essex, Vt.: Argo Books, 2008.) 22 Franz Rosenzweig, On Jewish Learning, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1955; 2nd ed. Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 69. 23 Rosenzweig, On Jewish Learning, 70. 24 For a fascinating account of this discussion, see Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). Donoghue’s argument traces the rise of this description to the turn of the twentieth century and the rise of both industrialization and corporate wealth. 25 It is hard not to notice Kennedy’s references to cosmopolitanism—being citizens of the world. Thus, service for Kennedy was not only about serving the nation, but also about serving the larger global community. http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/presiden/inaug/kennedy.htm 26 “Time's Environmental-War Whoop—‘Green is the new red, white and blue’?” http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MGFhNjAyYzAzODEzY2Q1YzcwOGZhM DRlZjRjMWU1OGM=. 27 Jimmy Carter, televised speech, April 18, 1977; emphasis has been added. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carter/filmmore/ps_energy.html. 28 In response to Goldberg’s claims, and also to a certain extent, Arendt’s concerns, I would offer the example of Teach for America—which refers to its teachers as members of a corps—for us to consider as an indirect legacy of Camp William James. See the “Teach for America” website: http://www.teachforamerica.org/. It is part of Americorps. It is interesting to note the numerous military references to this organization: teachers are referred to as part of a corps or an infantry. They are often referred to as working in the trenches, etc. Teach for America focuses specifically on providing an education to those who most need it and who are least likely to have it available to them by providing teachers to those areas. These teachers do not have degrees in education, nor did they initially see themselves as teachers; they became teachers through their service to others. They are among the best and the brightest of college graduates, those who both love and know their subject matter, offering education to children

408

Notes

in urban and rural areas who would not otherwise have access to a good elementary or high school education. Ironically, this particular call to service speaks to one of Arendt’s criticisms of American schooling. Arendt expresses concern that American schooling focuses too much on not only equality in education but also equality of opportunity. One can sympathize with her former concern, since this particular focus can lead to a corruption of merit, excellence, and so forth.28 But equality of opportunity does not necessarily lead to the same corruption. Instead, it simply ensures that all children are given an equal chance to reach their full potential. Yet, it is precisely this ideal that Arendt thinks forms the foundation of America’s crisis in education insofar as it leads to an undermining of merit and therefore an undermining of equality. However, it is the betrayal of this ideal, manifested in the inner city and rural schools around the country, that is the clarion call for these graduates who volunteer for Teach for America—many of whom graduate from the country’s elite colleges. These soon-to-be teachers respond to the importance of education to fulfill the promise of democracy. It is precisely the lack of opportunity for learning that has created the possibility for so many to become teachers. Interestingly, the Teach for America website proclaims that the single most important qualification for success as a teacher in Teach for America is evidence of effective leadership. Teach for America has provided one avenue for the ordinary person to see him or herself as a teacher and to rise to the call to teach. 29 Barack Obama, Inaugural Speech, January 20, 2009 (emphasis added). http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/01/20/obama.politics/index.html

INDEX

Abélard, Pierre, 40 Abraham, 52-53, 57, 60, 62, 65, 67, 81, 91-93, 144, 157, 161, 181, 183, 186-87, 201, 240, 279-80 Adam, 60, 155, 223 Adorno, Theodor, 273 Africa, 61, 67 Agamemnon, 93, 181 Ahasuerus, 265 Albee, Edward, 173 Alcibiades, 54 al-Ghazali, 357, 358 Allah, 56-57, 349-50, 353-57 Also Sprach Zarathustra (Friedrich Nietzsche), 51, 67, 73, 77, 79, 268 Altmann, Alexander, 105, 110, 113, 120, 136-39 Angewandte Seelenkunde (see also Applied Knowledge of the Soul and Practical Knowledge of the Soul) (Eugen RosenstockHuessy), 54, 101, 114-15, 119, 144, 164, 216 Anidjar, Gil, 355 Anselm of Canterbury, 89 anti-Christ, 320-21 anti-Semitic, 140, 158 anti-Semitism, 141, 148-49, 151-53, 311, 351 Applied Knowledge of the Soul (see also Angewandte Seelenkunde and Practical Knowledge of the Soul) (Eugen RosenstockHuessy), 216, 218, 221 Arendt, Hannah, 172, 333-38, 340, 343, 346 Aristotle, 43, 57, 58, 283, 339, 342 Arnaldez, R., 357

Asia, 61 Atem des Geistes, Der (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy), 285 Auden, W. H., 211 Augustine, Saint, 38, 142, 151, 164, 184, 238, 271 Auschwitz, 85 Baden-Baden Program, 76-78 Badt-Strauss, Bertha, 109 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 277, 282, 315, 359 Barnum, P.T., 320 Barth, Karl, 39, 102, 141-42, 215, 277-82, 284, 287-88 Batnitzky, Leora, 203 Baudelaire, Charles, 255-56 Baumann, Zygmunt, 329 Beck, Ulrich, 329 Beckett, Samuel, 170 Beeckman, Isaac, 69-70, 76 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 256 Benedict XVI, Pope, 357-58 Berdyaev, Nikolai (Nicholas), 215, 249, 262, 274 Bérulle, Cardinal Pierre de, 70 Betz, John R., 225 Bible, the, 43, 57, 65-66, 69, 79-80, 110, 160-61, 179, 227, 249, 251, 254, 257, 260, 263, 265-66, 271, 274 Bismarck, Otto von, 52, 320 Blum, Emil, 148 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 98, 142 Brecht, Bertold, 169, 171 Briefe und Tagebücher (Franz Rosenzweig), 75 Brinton, Crane, 51, 54 Brunet, A., 359 Brunner, Emil, 277

410 Bryant, M. Darrol, 197 Buber, Martin, 64, 111, 142, 170, 215, 299, 303, 351 Büchner, Georg, 173 Buddha, 79, 52-54 Bultmann, Rudolf, 169, 277, 280 Burckhardt, Jakob, 52, 74, 78 Burke, Edmund, 318 Burleigh, Michael, 331 Camp William James, 319, 333, 342-47 Canterbury, Dean of, 39 Carter, Jimmy, 345 Cartesian(s), 65, 71, 73, 78, 226, 267, 324 Cartesianism, 72, 266 Cervantes, Miguel de, 252 Chesterton, G. K., 38, 49 China, 52, 71, 103, 155, 203, 322 Christian, 50-51, 56-59, 61-62, 6466, 69-70, 80-85, 89, 91-94, 98, 101-2, 106, 108, 111, 119, 13132, 139-46, 148, 150-51, 15355, 157-60, 167, 175, 178, 181, 183-84, 186-88, 191-92, 195200, 202-5, 209-10, 213, 215, 224-25, 240, 249-50, 252, 254, 258, 260, 263-65, 270-72, 27475, 277, 279, 281, 294-95, 29798, 308-9, 311, 316, 320, 325, 349-51, 355-56, 358 Christian Future, The (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy), 52, 70, 190, 197, 233, 310, 323 Christianity, 37, 77, 54, 57, 59, 62, 64-65, 81, 110, 140, 143, 14547, 153-59, 177-79, 182-83, 187, 192, 194, 197-98, 200-1, 203, 212, 215, 218, 220, 223-24, 244, 245-50, 258-62, 264, 268, 270, 273-75, 277, 279-81, 29495, 309, 311, 315-16, 321, 34952, 355-56 Christians, 54, 59, 81, 84, 89, 93-94, 102, 107, 119-20, 140-43, 149,

Index 151, 154-58, 161, 183, 196, 198-99, 202, 204 Cicero, 184 Civilian Conservation Corps, 343 “Classic and a Founder, A” (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy), 340 Clausen, Detlev, 170 Cogito ergo sum, 213, 227 Cohen, Arthur A., 105 Cohen, Hermann, 96, 113, 119, 124 Cohn, Jonas, 127, 129 Cohn-Sherbok, Dan, 202, 205 Comte, Auguste, 170 Confucius, 52 Conrad, Joseph, 245 Copernicus, 310 Counter-Reformation, the, 295-96 Credo ut intelligam, 213, 227 Cristaudo, Wayne, 139, 161, 173, 197, 277, 289, 333 Croce, Benedetto, 316 Cross of Reality, 41, 72, 49, 53, 88, 90, 111, 118, 119, 144, 168, 170-72, 188-89, 211, 214, 22022, 228, 230, 234-35, 237, 239, 241, 292, 294-95 Crucifixion, the, 42 Cusanus, Nicolaus, 261 Cyprian, Saint, 142 Dante Alighieri, 252 Danton, George Jacques, 173 Dartmouth College, 305, 314, 326, 332-33, 346 Dayton, Donald W., 245 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edward Gibbon), 100 Decline of the West, The (Untergang des Abendlandes) (Oswald Spengler), 100-1, 310 del Nevo, Matthew, 243, 275 Derrida, Jacques, 166, 171 Descartes, Rene, 54, 61-76, 78-79, 148, 155, 173, 213 Deuteronomy, 175 Dewey, John, 57, 233, 324, 328, 333, 343

The Cross and the Star Dietrich, Marlene, 169 Diotima, 53, 74 Dominic, Saint, 219, 269 Dostoyevski, Fyodor, 255 Durckheim, Emile, 171 Ebner, Ferdinand, 154 Eddington, Arthur Stanley, 71 Egypt, 60, 63, 65-69, 160, 251 Ehrenberg, Hans, 77, 96, 107, 109, 126-27, 133, 138, 154, 215, 278, 288 Ehrenberg, Rudolf, 75-76, 81, 83, 88, 95-96, 99, 107, 109-10, 112, 118-19, 125-27, 131, 133, 177, 193, 215 Ehrenberg, Victor, 76 Elemente oder Das Immerwährende, Die (Franz Rosenzweig), 109 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 173, 220 Emmet, Dorothy, 105, 120, 136, 137, 303 English Revolution (Glorious Revolution), 320 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 58 Erlewine, Robert, 191, 205 Ermarth, H. Michael, 307, 332 eschatology, eschatological(ly), 3740, 48, 58, 84, 92-93, 182, 197, 201, 203, 205, 248, 307-9, 31516, 319-20, 322, 329, 331-32, 359 Eugen Rosenstock-HuessyGesellschaft, 70 Europäischen Revolutionen, Die (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy), 57, 139, 144 Europe, 61, 74, 81, 87, 101, 129, 147, 149, 154-55, 172, 189, 203, 210-11, 213-14, 246, 277, 310, 322, 326, 330, 349, 351, 354 existentialism, 49, 116 Fackenheim, Emil, 286 Faust, 74, 171, 259, 261, 269-70, 329

411

Faust (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe), 77, 90, 252, 256, 25961, 269 Faustian, 270, 310, 328 Faustus (Thomas Mann), 256, 313 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 76 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 86, 96, 158, 166, 172, 270 First World War (see World War I) Ford, Henry, 169 Förster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth, 51 Francis of Assisi, Saint, 219, 269 Franks, Paul, 203 Frazer, Sir James, 42 Frederick the Great, 150 French Revolution, 155, 246, 308, 314 Freud, Sigmund, 79, 149, 166, 316 Freyer, Hans, 50, 318 Froude, James Anthony, 317 Fuchs, Ernst, 224 Funkenstein, Amos, 114 Furtwängler, Wilhelm, 67 Galileo, 70 Gambetta, Leon, 149 Gardner, Clinton C., 291 Garfinkel, Harold, 172 Geheimnis der Universität, Das (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy), 70, 148 Geist, 50, 74, 76, 126 Genesis, 42, 49 German Reformation, 308 Germany, 38, 70, 78, 108, 129, 136, 142, 147, 149-50, 152, 158-59, 168-69, 172, 174, 247-48, 313, 321, 340 Gibbon, Edward, 100 Giddens, Anthony, 329 Gilson, Etienne, 69 Glatzer, Nahum Norbert, 105 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 54, 66-67, 74, 77, 166, 170-71, 220, 230, 243-75, 281, 312, 315, 328, 330 Gogarten, Friedrich, 100

412 Goldberg, Jonah, 344, 345 Gormann-Thelen, Michael, 73, 136, 163, 174 Gray, John, 329 Great Economy, 48 Greece, 60-61, 66-68 Greek(s), 67, 70, 77, 155, 179, 227, 256, 272, 278, 287, 342 language, 54, 58, 71-72, 230, 262, 295, 357 philosophy, 72, 50, 61, 149, 158, 227, 230, 277, 281, 357 Gregorian Revolution, 315, 320 Gregory of Nyssa, Saint, 142, 280 Habermas, Juergen, 194 Halevi, Yehuda (Judah ben Shmuel Ha-Levi), 106, 156, 189 Hallo, Rudolf, 114, 147, 153, 21516 Hamann, J. G., 91, 210-11, 222, 225, 320 Harnack, Adolf, 62 Harris, Cynthia, 150 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 219 Hayek, Friedrich von, 284 Hedges, Chris, 331 Heer, Friedrich, 56 Hegel and the State (Hegel und der Staat) (Franz Rosenzweig), 108 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 66, 54-55, 74, 76, 78, 85-87, 9192, 97, 106, 108, 127, 130, 16970, 172, 177, 181-83, 192, 194, 204, 270, 311, 313, 322, 328 Heidegger, Martin, 245, 307, 313 Heilsgeschichte, 38, 191, 198, 202, 205 Heine, Heinrich, 166 Hellingrath, Norbert, 53 Hellpach, Willy, 65 Henke, Anna, 108 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 78 Herodotus, 69, 92 Heschel, Susannah, 333 Hick, John, 202, 204-5 Hippocrates, 44

Index Hiroshima, 64 Hitler, Adolf, 52, 142, 149-50, 16061, 279, 287, 320-21 Hochzeit des Krieges und der Revolution, Die (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy), 167 Hoffmansthal, Hugo von, 317 Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich, 51, 53-55, 75 Holocaust, 142, 151-52, 161, 287, 351 Hopkins, Ernest, 326 Horwitz, Rivka, 143 Huessy, Hans R., 105, 143, 223, 291 Huessy, Lotti, 105 Huessy, Mark, 105 Huessy, Marliese, 133 Huessy, Marthi, 133 Humanism, 148-50, 153, 249, 257, 326, 330 Humanism, Humanists, 65 Humphrey, Hubert, 343 Huss, John, 263 I Am an Impure Thinker (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy), 211, 291, 294 Ibn Hazm, 357 Idealism, 43, 166 India, 52, 203 Inheritors of Industry, The (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy), 168 Isaac, 65, 67, 181, 186 Isaiah, 156, 175, 182, 184 Ishmael, 57 Islam, Islamic, 52-61, 66, 69, 140, 203, 349-58 Israel, 50, 59-61, 65-70, 81, 83, 150, 159-61, 175, 179-81, 183-84, 189, 196, 199, 260, 283, 351 Ja und Nein (Eugen RosenstockHuessy), 70, 75, 218, 220, 287 Jacob, 65, 67 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 74, 222, 258-59, 266-67 Jacobi-Lessing conversation, 75-76

The Cross and the Star James, William, 56, 319-20, 323-24, 331, 333, 336, 338, 342-47 Janos, Fr. S., 249 Jaspers, Carl, 50 Jeffers, Robinson, 319 Jesus, Jesus Christ, 52-53, 57, 5961, 65-66, 69-70, 88-89, 91-93, 143, 155, 159, 171, 178, 181, 183, 187-88, 202, 224, 240-41, 243-44, 247-51, 260-62, 264-65, 273-75, 278-80, 282, 285, 28788, 320, 351 Jewish, 50-51, 54, 61-66, 69-70, 8081, 84-85, 88-89, 91, 93-94, 98, 111-12, 119, 139-42, 145-51, 153, 155-59, 161, 165, 167, 175, 177-84, 187-89, 191-92, 196, 198-99, 202, 204, 262, 265, 279, 311, 340-41, 349-51, 354-56, 358 Jewishness, 139, 142-43, 149 Jews, 54, 59, 65, 68-70, 81, 84, 89, 92-94, 102, 140-44, 148-51, 153-61, 170, 177-78, 181, 18384, 186-87, 191, 194-96, 198200, 202, 204, 240, 286, 349, 351, 353, 355 John of Chrysostom, Saint, 142 John, Saint, 83, 90, 209, 243, 249 Journel, Rouet de, 38 Joyce, James, 73, 167 Judaism, 51, 54-55, 57, 59, 61-65, 69-70, 81, 84, 94, 110, 140, 145-47, 149-50, 153-55, 157, 167, 177-79, 181, 183-84, 192, 194, 196, 198, 200-3, 215, 218, 220, 259-60, 291-92, 303, 34951, 356 Judaism Despite Christianity (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy), 75, 136, 142, 145, 147, 191-96, 198, 218, 291, 303 Kafka, Franz, 166 Kähler, Siegfried, 129 Kahn, Mawrik, 109

413

Kant, Immanuel, 79, 56, 87, 90-91, 96, 145, 152, 166, 177, 193-94, 246, 255, 261, 283-84 Kaplan, Gregory, 175, 190 Katz, Claire, 333, 347 Kaufmann, Fritz, 218 Kaufmann, Walter, 270 Kennedy, John F., 333, 343, 347 Kepler, Johannes, 261 Kerr, Fergus, 225 Keynes, John Maynard, 319 Khoury, Theodore, 357 Kierkegaard, Søren, 91, 181, 249, 280, 311, 318 Kindt, Judith, 169 Kissinger, Henry, 320 Kleine Schriften (Franz Rosenzweig), 95 Kleinere Schriften (Franz Rosenzweig), 118 Klettenberg, Susanne Katherina von, 263-64 Kobre, Reva, 333 Kobre, Sidney, 333 Koch, Richard, 170 Königshaus und Stämme (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy), 77, 213 Lacan, Jacques, 172 Lagerlöf, Selma, 78, 110, 139 Lao-tse, 79, 52-54 Last Man, 41 Last Things, 38, 40 Lawrenz, Jürgen, 61, 79 Leibniz, Gottfried, 261 Leipzig Conversation, 73-82, 85, 88, 94, 110, 112, 177 Leithart, Peter, 225, 241 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 320 Leo Baeck Institute, 105, 136 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 74-75, 78, 91, 166 Levenson, Jon, 180 Levinas, Emanuel, 286 Lilla, Mark, 331 Lincoln, Abraham, 233, 320, 328

414 “Liturgical Thinking” (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy), 294-95 Logos, the, 43, 84, 90-91, 182, 315, 358 Long, Huey, 45 Louis XVIII, 199 Löwith, Karl, 281 Ludendorff, Erich, 149 Luther, Martin, 142, 182, 184, 24648, 271, 320 Maimonides, 357 Mann, Thomas, 256, 313 Mannheim, Karl, 324 Marcion, 89 Marx, Karl, 39, 66, 78, 149, 313, 322, 328 Marxism, 155, 169 Mary, 251 Materialism, 43 May, Karl, 60 McDermott, John, 333 Meier, Ephraim, 143 Meinecke, Friedrich, 76-77, 108 Meiri, Menachem, 203 Melville, Herman, 219 Mendelssohn, Moses, 91 Mendes-Flohr, Paul, 114, 192 Mersenne, Marin, 70 Messiah, 52, 59, 65, 70, 156-57, 189 Meyer, Rabbi Marshall, 140 Meyer-Abich, Adolf, 359 Mirabeau, Honoré, 318 Miracles of the Antichrist, The (Selma Lagerlöf), 110, 139 Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur, 318 Mohammed, 55, 57-58, 60, 356-57 Molen, Lise van der, 55, 105 Moltke, Freya von, 105 Moltke, Konrad von, 105, 214 Moltke, Ulrike von Haeften von, 105 Mommsen, Theodor, 72 moral equivalent of war, 338, 344, 346-47 Moral Equivalent of War (William James), 319, 331, 336, 338

Index Morgan, George Allen, 39, 41, 105, 359 Morgan, Michael, 203 Moses, 58, 60, 62, 67, 251 Müller, Georg, 49, 70, 119, 144, 164 Mussolini, Benito, 320 Napoleon, 314, 320 National Socialism, Nazi(s), 140, 142, 150, 169-70, 172, 176, 286, 307, 313, 315, 318, 320 neo-Kantian(ism), 51, 59, 76, 127 Neue Denken, Das (Franz Rosenzweig), 49, 73 New Thinking, The, 49, 73-74, 9496, 99, 101, 108, 114, 118, 203 Newman, Cardinal John, 75, 305 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 39 Niemöller, Martin, 158 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 39-43, 45-46, 48, 51-52, 54-58, 61-63, 65-69, 72-79, 92, 163, 173, 220, 248, 268-70, 275, 284, 313, 314 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 307, 313, 318 Oakeshott, Michael, 284 Obama, Barack, 347 On Education (Franz Rosenzweig), 106 Ong, Walter, 209, 212 Oppenheim, Gertrud, 78, 107, 109, 126-28 Origen of Alexandra, 142 Ortega y Gasset, José, 323 Ostfalens Rechtsliteratur unter Friedrich II (Eugen RosenstockHuessy), 77, 79, 212 Out of Revolution (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy), 139, 144, 149, 151, 154, 167, 198-99, 213, 223, 285, 291, 308, 315, 323, 328 pagan(s), paganism, 54-55, 57-59, 65, 68, 92, 108, 112, 139, 14244, 148-52, 154, 156-61, 17981, 183-84, 187, 196, 198-99,

The Cross and the Star 201, 203, 250, 258, 266, 270-71, 274, 278, 281, 296, 316, 320-21, 349-56 Palestine, 61, 70 Palmer, Gesine, 352 Paré, Gerard, 359 Pareto, Vilfredo, 316 Parmenides, 72 Parnham, Charles F., 244 Parsons, Talcott, 169 Parteiung der Philosophie, Die (Hans Ehrenberg), 126-27 Pascal, Blaise, 251, 320 Paul, Saint, 58, 65, 81, 132, 171, 184, 241, 243, 273 Peace Corps, 343-45 Pease, Donald E., 291, 305 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 259 Pentecostal(ism), 243-46, 248-49, 253, 259, 262, 269-74 Peter, Saint, 132, 243 Pfaff, William, 329, 331 philosophy, 41-42, 50-51, 54, 57-59, 63, 66, 74-79, 82, 85-87, 94-96, 99, 109, 111, 113, 127, 139, 148, 153, 158, 164, 166, 172, 175, 177-78, 181-82, 191-92, 194-95, 197-98, 200-3, 205 Picasso, Pablo, 164 Picht, Werner, 215, 278 Pinnock, Clark, 262 Planck, Max, 67 Plato, 54, 58, 63, 74, 283, 339 Plenge, Johann, 310, 313 Poetry and Truth (Goethe), 74 Polanyi, Karl, 310, 316 Polybius, 316 Popper, Karl, 284 post-Christian, 61 Practical Knowledge of the Soul (see also Angewandte Seelenkunde and Applied Knowledge of the Soul) (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy), 115, 144, 177, 185, 230 pre-Christian, 50, 61, 66, 81

415

Proclus, 72 Prometheus, 71 Protestant(s), 150, 215, 221, 243-46, 263, 265, 273-75 Protestantism, 132, 243-46, 252, 268 Qur’an, the, 56-57, 93 Rang, Florens Christian, 215 Ranke, Leopold von, 314 Raumnot, 61 Rawls, John, 194 Realism, 43 Reinharz, Jehuda, 114 Religionsphilosophie und Heilsgeschichte. Franz Rosenzweig und Eugen Rosenstock (K. G. Müller), 50 Renaissance, 296, 320, 327 Respondeo etsi mutabor, 188, 211, 213, 227, 293, 301 Revolt of the Masses, The (José Ortega y Gasset), 323 Rickert, Heinrich, 77 Rohde, Erwin, 52 Roman Catholic, 131-32, 150, 215, 221, 243-44, 263, 265, 275, 282 Roman Catholic), 263 Roman Elegies (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe), 273 Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen, 37, 49, 52-53, 55, 57-58, 61-62, 64, 6667, 75, 77, 79, 87, 89, 91-92, 95, 100-2, 105-6, 108-9, 112, 11619, 121-22, 124-25, 128-33, 136-40, 143, 145-48, 150-53, 155, 158-59, 163, 165-73, 17577, 180-85, 187, 189, 192, 19497, 199-201, 203-5, 209-40, 277-88, 291-301, 303-5, 307-25, 327-33, 335-40, 343, 345-46 Rosenstock-Huessy, Margrit, 105-9, 112, 114, 119-20, 124, 126, 128, 130-34, 136, 141, 143 Rosenzweig, Adele, 115, 120, 124, 127-28, 130, 133

416 Rosenzweig, Edith Hahn, 106, 111, 116, 141 (Edith Rosenzweig Scheinmann), 216 Rosenzweig, Franz, 49-51, 53, 55, 58, 61, 63-64, 69, 75, 78-79, 8384, 86-93, 95-97, 99, 101-2, 105-9, 113, 115-16, 118-22, 124, 126-31, 133-34, 136-37, 139-40, 143-49, 153-58, 160-61, 163-67, 170, 173, 175-81, 18387, 189, 192, 194-96, 199-205, 214-16, 218-20, 222-23, 243-45, 247-48, 251, 259-60, 270, 279, 281-82, 285, 292, 294, 308-9, 311-12, 333, 340-41, 349-53, 355, 357-58 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 145 Russia, 101 Russian Revolution, 155, 315, 326 Rüstow, Alexander, 50 Sabbath, 52, 61-63, 65-70 Sacks, Rabbi Jonathan, 246 Sade, Marquis de, 172 Saint-Simon, Henri (Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de SaintSimon), 170-72 Sarah, 181 Savigny, Friedrich Carl von, 77 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 85-87, 97, 172, 203, 243, 270, 330 Schiller, Friedrich, 53, 166 Schlegel, Friedrich, 86-87, 313, 320 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst, 75, 90 Schmied-Kowarzik, Wolfdietrich, 136 Schmitt, Carl, 318 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 257, 261, 270, 325 Schurz, Carl, 328 Schwartz, Yossef, 352 Schweitzer, Albert, 49 Second World War (see World War II)

Index Seidenberg, Roderick, 316 “Selbstmord Europas, Der” (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy), 101, 277 Seymour, Joseph W., 244 Shakespeare, William, 216, 246, 252, 256 Shelley, Percy Byssche, 165 Simon, Ernst, 141 Smith, James K.A., 225 Smith, Page, 343 Socrates, 58, 72, 74 Söderblom, Archbishop Nathan, 40, 49 Sohm, Rudolf, 77 Solomon, 257 Sorokin, Pitirim, 316 Soziologie (Eugen RosenstockHuessy), 49, 52-53, 59, 66, 70, 88, 119, 144, 152, 155, 165, 168, 210, 212, 214, 220, 281 Speech and Reality (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy), 220-21, 291, 294 speech-letters (Sprachbriefe), 106, 107, 108 speech-thinker(s), speech-thinking (see also Sprachdenker, Sprachdenken), 49, 55, 66, 99, 111, 114-15, 119, 166-67, 211, 215-16, 220, 273, 291-95, 298, 303, 305 Spengler (Asia Times Online), 349 Spengler, Oswald, 55, 82, 100-1, 310, 315, 318 Spinoza, Baruch, 54, 148, 175, 261, 265-68, 300 Spivak, Gayatri, 164 Sprachdenker, Sprachdenken (see also speech-thinker(s), speechthinking), 49, 114, 136, 184, 210, 225 Sprache des Menschengeschlechts, Die (Eugen RosenstockHuessy), 164, 168 Stahl, Friedrich Julius, 149

The Cross and the Star Stahmer, Harold M., 105, 135-37, 209, 224, 291 Stalin, Josef, 320-21 Star of Redemption, The (Der Stern der Erlösung) (Franz Rosenzweig), 81, 49-50, 52, 5455, 70, 73, 83, 95-96, 98, 10610, 112, 114, 117-20, 124-31, 133-34, 136-37, 139, 143-46, 150, 153-54, 156-59, 164, 167, 180, 185-86, 193, 199, 216-18, 243, 248, 250, 279-80, 349-52, 355 Stern der Erlösung, Der (Franz Rosenzweig). See Star of Redemption, The Strauß, David Friedrich, 76 Strauss, Eduard, 340 Tao, the, 53 Ten Commandments, 58 Teresa of Avila, 269 Tertullian, 89 Theological Existence Today (Karl Barth), 141 theology, 56-57, 61, 66, 75-76, 84, 91, 94, 98, 101-2, 140, 165, 169, 172, 175, 191, 195-97, 201, 205 Thirty Years’ War, 61 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 297, 357 Thomas, Saint, 269 Thurneysen, Eduard, 277-78 Tillich, Paul, 39, 277 Tolstoy, Leo, 252 Torah, the, 62-63, 202, 355-56 Toulmin, Stephen, 329 Tremblay, 359 Trinity, the, 42 triunity, 57 Trotsky, Leon, 318, 320 Ullmann, Wolfgang, 73, 102 Understanding the Sick and the Healthy (Franz Rosenzweig), 106, 108 United States, 106, 164, 169, 203 Urs von Balthasar, Hans, 359

417

Urworte. Orphisch (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe), 271 Valéry, Paul, 68 Vanhoozer, Kevin, 225 Varnhagen, Rahel von, 172 Veda, the, 52 Venetian Epigrams (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe), 273 Vico, Giambattista, 175, 315 Vogt, Roland, 49, 71, 73, 103 Volksschule und Reichsschule (Franz Rosenzweig), 87, 95 Voltaire, 58 Vom Industrierecht-Rechtssystematische Fragen (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy), 213-14 von Bülow, Cosima, 56 Wagner, Richard, 56, 66, 71, 76, 166, 173 Warburg, Aby, 166 Wartenburg, Peter Yorck von, 64 Weber, Max, 50, 169, 175, 322 Weismantel, Leo, 215, 278 Weizsäcker, Viktor von, 107, 118, 127, 215, 278, 299, 303 Wesley, John, 245 Whalen, Grover, 52 What Nietzsche Means (George Allen Morgan), 39 Whitehead, Alfred North, 359 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 166 Wilamowitz-Möllendorf, Ulrich von, 52, 74 Wilder, Amos, 210, 224 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe), 251-53, 255-56, 259-60, 263, 265, 267 Wilkens, Eckart, 105, 214 Wilson, Woodrow, 320 Winckler, Hugo, 67 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 225 Wittig, Joseph, 215, 298-305 Woelfflin, Heinrich, 166 Wolfenbüttel, 51

418 Word, the, 43, 209-11, 241, 247, 288, 304, 315 World War I, 82, 85, 102, 149, 152, 155, 176, 192, 212-13, 288, 310-12, 315, 351 World War II, 65, 141, 152, 158, 161, 168, 280, 343

Index Wyschogrod, Michael, 142 Yom Kippur, 63, 68-69 Yong, Amos, 245 Zarathustra, 55-56, 58, 67, 72, 7778, 248, 269 Zinzendorf, Nikolus Ludwig Graf von, 263