Rosenstock-Huessy

 “GOD IS THE SPEAKING VOICE”

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE THOUGHT OF

EUGEN ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY

A few years ago, in the early days of the COVID kerfuffle, Alison Blunt, an English composer and musician, sent me a composition of hers in which she had incorporated, in my voice, a sentence I had recently spoken in an interview with Kristof Vanhoutte of the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking.  She and I began to correspond, and presently she sent me a PDF of The Christian Future by Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy and urged me to read it.  I had run across Rosenstock-Huessy’s name quite a few times over the years, most notably in legal historian Harold Berman’s magnificent Law and Revolution, in which Berman repeatedly acknowledges Rosenstock-Huessy as a formative influence on his thinking.  Reading Berman was an important epoch in my coming to understand that Ivan Illich’s intuition that “modernity can be studied as an extension of Church history” was not as eccentric as Illich sometimes supposed, and I made a note then to follow up with Rosenstock-Huessy some day.[1]  Alison’s nudge finally got me started, and I found The Christian Future so invigorating and inspiring that within a couple of years, I had read almost everything of Rosenstock-Huessy’s I could find in English.  The following essay is my tribute.  I wrote it, first, to test and consolidate my own understanding of Rosenstock-Huessy’s thought – it was one of his axioms that truth is what survives communication – and, beyond that, to share my findings with friends who might possibly find comparable inspiration.  Since many of these friends are fellows students and inheritors of Ivan Illich, I’ve begun with a brief prologue concerning the ways in which my encounter with Illich created the context in which I read Rosenstock-Huessy: 

In The Rivers North of the Future, Ivan Illich argues that “our present world can finally only be understood as a perversion of the New Testament,” or, alternately, “that modernity can be studied as an extension of Church history.” He paints this idea in bold, vivid strokes, but, at the same time, puts its forward quite tentatively.  He has offered, he says, only “a little pencil sketch of where I think I have been standing.”[2] His idea is not a finished theory, but only a tentatively offered “research hypothesis.”[3]  He is committed to his idea – “it would be wrong,” he thinks, “to allow [himself] to be deflected from this hypothesis” – but he characterizes it, even so, as no more than an inarticulate “stammering.”[4] Both his confidence and his reticence were genuine, I think.   One reason for his hesitation was the explosive, and easily misunderstood, implications of his idea for the reputation and standing of the Church – how easy it would be, as several friends pointed out to him, to assimilate his critique to old Protestant, and proto-Protestant, images of the Roman Church as Anti-Christ.  Another was the novelty of his sociology, a novelty which philosopher Charles Taylor recognizes in his preface to the book.  Theories of modernity, Taylor says, have tended to divide for and against – proponents arguing that modernity has successfully “secularized” Christianity, opponents insisting, on the contrary, that modernity has abandoned its faith.  Illich stands outside this dichotomy.  For him, modernity is neither the realization nor the rejection of Christianity but its perversion – an idea that suggests, not that we ought to choose a team, but rather that we are blind to the  origin of our way of life and so have no clear idea where we are, how we got here, or how we might eventually get to a more habitable place.  Illich is also novel, Taylor points out, in advancing this idea from within Christianity, as a man of faith, and in arguing that, though “the historical consequences of Christian belief” are manifest to all, there are also dimensions of the contemporary situation whose full meaning “only faith can discern.”[5] 

Illich died with the feeling that his ideas had found little echo outside of his immediate circle.  He said, of his thesis that the contemporary discourses of Life are rooted in “a perverse transmutation of…Christian vocation,” that he “had not even found a first conversational partner within any of the established churches.”[6]  In proposing that modern conceptions of technology could only have arisen “in a world conceived in the spirit of [the Christian doctrine] of contingency,” he thought that he was “pretty much alone among the historians of science.”[7]  He was sufficiently unsure about how the interviews that comprise The Rivers North of the Future would be received  by readers that he hesitated for nearly three years after their broadcast in Canada before finally authorizing their publication.  That book appeared in 2005, more than two years after Illich’s death.  By then I had already begun to discover that Illich’s work had a good deal more resonance among his contemporaries than he had imagined.  The first sign was a call from Charles Taylor after he had listened to the radio broadcast of “The Corruption of Christianity.”[8] He told me, as he would later put it in his preface to The Rivers North of the Future that he “had been working for a number of years on a project to account for the rise of secular civilization” – a project that came to fruition in his consummate A Secular Age in 2007 – and that his “basic thesis…was similar to Illich’s.”  I soon discovered many other affinities with Illich’s “research hypothesis” in contemporary theology and philosophy.[9]  John Milbank’s work in theology is one notable example, as is Giorgio Agamben’s in philosophy.   

Illich’s hypothesis that the modern West, and its worldwide sequels, rest on a misapprehension, misappropriation and misapplication of the Christian inspiration invites us to “rethink everything,” as his friend Teodor Shanin (1930-2020) has said.  What should we call those who attempt this rethinking?   Shanin’s successors at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences – an institution that Shanin founded in 1995 and that is usually called, in his memory, Shaninka – have proposed “The International of Hope,” a name coined by Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, aka Subcomandante Marcos, the masked, pipe-smoking theorist and anti-leader of the Zapatista insurgency in the Mexican province of Chiapas.   It’s a lovely name and very much in the spirit of Illich, who wrote in his essay “The Rebirth of Epimethean Man” that nothing less than “the survival of the human race” depends on the “rediscovery [of hope] as a social force.”[10]  What the thinkers that might be grouped under this banner have in common, say Shanin’s colleagues in planning documents for a symposium called “Rethink Everything” that they held in April of 2025, is that these thinkers “were all convinced that [there was a] moment in the history of Modern civilization when everything went wrong.”  They all had been somehow brought to “the thought that perhaps the Western experiment…had been a mistake,” in the blunt formula with which Canadian philosopher George Grant once astounded me.[11]  This is often taken as a despairing or pessimistic thought, and these were labels often enough applied to Grant, despite his objections.  (“Civilization come and go,” he said, but “if you believe in God, you must be an optimist.”[12])  It’s an optimistic thought, above all, because it suggests that there is another way – “[an] unknown future that mankind has missed and must seek to rejoin,” as John Milbank puts it.[13]  

Along the road to the discovery of this fatal disjuncture, and the future north of the future that it will potentially disclose, one of my great recent finds has been the work of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, the thinker for whom I hope to make a few new friends by this essay.  (After his marriage he joined his name to that of his beloved wife Margrit Hüssy according to an old custom in her native Switzerland, but, with respect, I will just use the more manageable Rosenstock here.)  I had come across references to Rosenstock over the years – I knew of his friendship with German Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig; I was aware that American legal historian Harold Berman had drawn extensively on Rosenstock in the former’s monumental Law and Revolution, one of the first books to show me that Illich’s claim that “modernity can be studied as an extension of church history” might be a more widely shared insight than Illich sometimes intimated.  But it was not until a friend pressed Rosenstock’s The Christian Future on me a couple of years ago, that I began to read him.  Soon I couldn’t stop and, by now, I think I have read most of what is available in English.[14] 

It quickly became evident that Rosenstock is a thinker who is famous for not being famous.   His friend, poet W.H. Auden, in a foreword he contributed to a collection of Rosenstock’s essays, says that as “a poet by vocation” he approached Rosenstock’s work with no expectation that he could “learn much about Language from a writer of Prose,” but ended up indebted to Rosenstock for about “half of what I now know” about various aspects of poetics.[15]  Nevertheless when Auden included several of Rosenstock’s apperçus in the Viking Book of Aphorisms, which he co-edited, a reviewer objected to the inclusions of sayings by someone the reviewer had never heard of.   Epithets like “neglected” and “ahead of his time” are frequent in the scant secondary literature on Rosenstock.  “While the stars of former friends and associates, such as [Martin] Buber and [Paul] Tillich, waxed in the United States,” writes one of his most discerning interpreters, Australian scholar Wayne Cristaudo, “[Rosenstock] was largely unknown and unlistened to, except for some devoted undergraduates who taped his… lectures for posterity.”[16]  A principal reason for this obscurity is the unclassifiable character of Rosenstock’s thought.  He commented on it himself in the closing pages of his book Out of Revolution: 

I have survived decades of study and teaching in scholastic and academic sciences. Every one of their venerable scholars mistook me for the intellectual type which he most despised. The atheist wanted me to disappear into Divinity, the theologians into sociology, the sociologists into history, the historians into journalism, the journalists into metaphysics, the philosophers into law, and—need I say it?—the lawyers into hell, which as a member of our present world I have never left. For nobody leaves hell all by himself without going mad.[17] 

Rosenstock was a formidable scholar – in 1912, at the age of twenty-four he was already a professor in the history law at the University of Leipzig, the youngest to hold the rank of Privatdozent in Germany at the time – but he disliked academic pretension and refused to be confined, or defined, by disciplinary boundaries.[18]  (Rather like Illich who also tried to “shed… certain…extremely sticky and persistent… academics etiquettes, like the organization of knowledge into specialized and exclusive disciples.”[19])  Rosenstock wrote about language but rejected the granular analysis practiced by scientific linguistics as missing the forest for the trees.  He was sometimes called a philosopher, and at a pinch would own to the name of “social philosopher,” but he refused much of post-Heideggerian philosophy and said that Heidegger’s famous “question of Being” was a red herring.  Being, he said, is an “unfortunate,” totalizing and, ultimately, “silly” abstraction, because “we cannot ascertain what is apart from speaking about it” and “Contrariety remains the only bridge that leads to the whole.”[20]  He upset sociologists – those few who were paying attention – by his astonishing claim that “Grammar is social science” and “language…a system of social relations.”[21]  Theologians blanched at his claim that God is a name on which we call, and in which we act, not a being that we can know in some abstract or metaphysical fashion. Marxism and psychoanalysis were both alien to him, and he belonged to no party or movement – as little a traditionalist as a modernist, as far from the left as he was from the right.  A man entirely of the present – “Timeliness is everything,” was one of his sayings[22] – he belonged ultimately to the future, not the future that comes later, but the future that he says “must be created,” the future that consists in doing the “one thing necessary” right now.[23]

Rosenstock was set on this path early in his life.  He was born in Berlin in 1888 to a comfortably situated family of assimilated Jews.  In 1909 he was baptized a Christian but said later that this represented no dramatic conversion, as he had grown up a Christian in all but name, and felt the truth of Christianity from a young age.   He was, as I’ve said, an academic prodigy, and, while he was teaching the philosophy and history of law at the University of Leipzig, he became acquainted with a young Jewish scholar, two years older than he, named Franz Rosenzweig.  The two became friends, and an intense conversation began about language, religion and the relations between Christianity and Judaism.  When Rosenstock offered their correspondence to the public in a book called Judaism Despite Christianity, many years after Rosenzweig’s untimely death in 1929, he said that the two of them had “exchanged life rhythms,” submerging their “individual purposes” in a “process of recreation.”  Rosenzweig has a standing within academic philosophy that Rosenstock never gained, and successors and scholars of the better-known of the two friends, jealous of their man’s autonomy and originality, have not always been willing to acknowledge the extent of this interpenetration and metamorphic alteration, but that was how Rosenstock saw it.  Out of their conversation grew the idea of speech thinking – the idea that understanding is an event of speech and not the transcription of some event which is prior to speech – an idea that Rosenzweig would develop in his monumental The Star of Redemption, and Rosenstock would continue to elaborate to the end of his life.  At the same time, as one can read in their letters, they redefined the relationship between Christianity and Judaism as one of reciprocity and mutual clarification, and denounced the zero-sum hypothesis that if one is true the other must be false.

All this went on in the midst of war while both men were serving in the Imperial German Army, Rosenstock as a lieutenant, later captain, in artillery.  For 18 months he was stationed at Verdun, the site of the longest and deadliest battle of the war –700,000 casualties and 300,000 deaths over 302 days.  There, in the wreckage of the West – “a naked worm,” as he once described his sense of himself when cowering in a shell crater in no man’s land during an artillery exchange[24] – he realized that his world had changed decisively and irreversibly.  He had witnessed, he would say later, “a Last Judgment…on Wilhelm II’s Germany.”[25]  Before the war, he had been seen himself as an academic – “the idol of scholarship held me firmly in its grip” – as a nationalist – “ the god of law and power held my allegiance” – and as a man of the Church – “on the road to integral ‘Churchism.’”  By war’s end, all these institutions had “lost their scent.”[26]  In 1918, when he was still in uniform, and in keeping with the reputation he had achieved before the war, three eminent position were offered to him: he could return to the University of Leipzig; he was invited to Berlin to help write the constitution of the new German republic as an undersecretary in the Ministry of the Interior; and he was offered an editorship in Munich at Germany’s leading religious magazine, the “Hochland.”  He refused all three offers and took an obscure position at the Daimler Benz automobile factory in Stuttgart, where, among other things, he edited a newspaper for the workers.  

        Rosenstock had been “called,” in his own words, “into a new, dangerous form of existence which did not yet exist.”[27]  It was his task, as he saw it, to help invent this new form of life.  But this was not, he insisted, “an act of the will” but rather “an unwillingness to continue,” a “giving up” on the “dead works” of the exhausted institutions whose blandishments he had refused.  Such “unwillingness,” he says, “is not an act but an experience.  The words make no sense, the atmosphere is stifled.  One chokes.  One has no choice but to leave.  But one does not know what is going to happen, one has no blueprint for action.”[28]   His improvisations thereafter took two forms.  The plunge into worker education at Daimler prefigured one of these forms.  Like a new Benedict of Nursia (480-547), who urged his monks in his Rule to integrate prayer and work (ora et labora), Rosenstock sought new ways in which physical, intellectual and spiritual pursuits could be combined and harmonized.  In 1921 he founded the Akademie der Arbeit (Academy of Labour) in Frankfurt am Main.  When he returned to university teaching in Breslau in 1923, he also devoted himself to adult education in the area around Breslau.   Along with some of his students, “he helped organize voluntary work service camps for students, farmers, and workers to address the appalling living conditions and atrocious labor conditions at coal mines” in the area.[29]  He continued this work after he emigrated to the United States in 1933, and was pleased to discover, when he read William James essay “The Moral Equivalent of War,” that the leading American philosopher of the age shared his ideas.  In this essay, which began as a talk at Stanford in 1906, James recognized that mechanization and mass mobilization had rendered war “absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity,” but insisted that war would never be given up until some other way was found to evoke the virtues of discipline, sacrifice, and self-abnegation that war had immemorially summoned and expressed.[30]  When Rosenstock was asked by President Roosevelt to create  a special training camp for leaders of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in Vermont, Rosenstock called the initiative Camp William James.   The camp successfully mobilized students from Harvard, Radcliffe and Dartmouth, where Rosenstock taught, but it was disbanded when the United States entered the Second World War.   Camp William James has often been seen as a precedent, and perhaps an inspiration, for John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps, and for VISTA, its subsequent domestic incarnation.  It’s worth noting, however, that the Peace Corps, as a creature of American foreign policy, was not entirely what Rosenstock and James had in mind.  Rosenstock’s Breslau students worked in the coal mines of Silesia, James imagined his youthful conscripts deployed in “freight trains and fishing fleets…foundries and stoke holes.”[31]

This was one side of Rosenstock’s search for a way of life “which did not yet exist.”  The other, which I’ll focus on here, was his copious and always lively writings – all of them crackling with energy, wit, and a gift for aphorism.  (His student Clinton Gardener, stuck by his teacher’s knack for the right word in the right place at the right time, assembled a book of sayings called Life Lines which brought together many of Rosenstock’s most brilliant and characteristic formulations.[32])  I’ll begin my discussion of these writings with what Rosenstock describes as the “vision that slowly ascended before my inner eye on a winter morning” at Verdun in 1917.[33]  In the midst of a catastrophic ending, he had a vision of beginnings, and only by writing it down, he said, could he finally “demobilize” and salvage what he could from the ruin of so many.[34]  This took many years.  It was not until 1931, he later wrote, “that the time for a book of scholarship returned for me.”  It was then that he published Die Europäischen Revolutionen, in which he considered in rich historical detail the character of the revolutions that had shaped the West, beginning with what he called “the papal revolution” touched off by Gregory VII’s declaration of papal supremacy in 1077, and proceeding through the Reformation, and the English, American, French and Russian Revolutions. 

His hypothesis, in brief, is that “every revolution starts from faith,” and, specifically, from the characteristically Christian conviction that “the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,” and that all things can be “made new.”[35]  The history of revolution is therefore the story of “the march of the Holy Spirit through the nations.”[36]  This faith is explicit in the first Western revolutions,  but appears mostly in displaced forms after the time of the American and French revolutions.  In Rosenstock’s typology, revolutions begin in the despair that is occasioned by loss of faith in a once cogent and compelling social order.  “The great Revolutions seem to destroy an existing order,” he writes, ‘but that is not true.  They do not break out until the old state of affairs is already ended…[in the sense that it] is no longer believed.”[37]  This is the moment at which a new word must be spoken.  It is often preceded by what was called in the days before the French Revolution erupted la grande peur (the great fear).  The same apprehension seized Germany in the years before Hitler came to power, and was also marked at the end of the first millennium when Frederick II proclaimed “the end of time.”

Rosenstock qualifies himself in this book as “non-revolutionary” – pacific and conservative by temperament – but he says that he has been forced to the conclusion that “creation goes on as God’s creation has always done…A thunderstorm of destruction clears the air; then follows the low rustle of growth and reconstruction.  We may assign the noise to the devil, and the still small voice to God.  But only wishful thinking can exclude either of these sounds.”  This composite of destruction and creation takes place in a space that Rosenstock calls “the open.”  This domain stands outside all normal distinctions and rules of order.  It is neither public nor private, neither legal nor illegal, neither good nor evil because it is the very crucible in which these terms will assume or resume their meanings, a realm in which men are “driven by the angels and demons of love and fear.”[38]  In this claim Rosenstock stands very close to his fellow German jurist Carl Schmitt, and to Schmitt’s insistence that sovereignty always comes before law.  (Rosenstock knew Schmitt as a fellow legal scholar, and they were on cordial terms until Schmitt threw in his lot with the Nazis and Rosenstock broke with him.)  “Sovereignty comes first,” Rosenstock says, and only when it has been forged in the fires of political creation can a legal order grow out of this primal act.  “No power can derive its sovereignty from laws.”[39]  The storming of the Bastille, the raising of the New Model Army [in the English Civil War], Luther’s 95 theses nailed to the church door in Wittenberg – these must always come first.   

Rosenstock’s contention that revolution occurs in a space “beyond good and evil” is shocking – or was to me, since I share his non-revolutionary temper – but he insists that “the idealist who thinks anything can be good outside of time and space only makes a fool of himself.”  “Timeliness is everything,” he writes, and what is good is good only when it is timely and may be bad “when [it is] too late or early.”[40]  Revolution for him is action at the right time.  The same action might at another time be entirely quixotic.  Necessity is the mark of “true revolution,” arbitrary action the sign of “a political charlatan or a despot.”[41]

The thought that timing determines good and evil, rather than the other way round, might be considered a radical existentialism, and that is certainly a word that sometimes suggests itself in Rosenstock’s case, but I think his view is better described as a philosophy of incarnation.  It is the Incarnation, for Rosenstock, that puts the capacity to recreate and renew the world in human hands.  Christianity, says historian of religions Mircea Eliade, “valoriz[es] Time” and, in valorizing time, invents history.[42]  Wittgenstein calls this valorization “the apocalyptic view of the world” – the view that “things don’t repeat themselves” and that events therefore always tend towards some culmination at which their meaning will be revealed and judged.[43]  All Christians, up to now, have, by definition, shared this view, but Rosenstock asserts it with particular clarity and force.  “The nature of man is his time,” he declares bluntly.[44]   According to Rosenstock, Christianity perfects and universalizes this view, which is already prefigured in the prophets of Israel.  He honours the three great “streams of speech” which feed into Christianity.  He calls them, first, the speech of “the tribes” who “listened to the spirits of their dead” but still lived in anxious and ritualized dependence on their gods; second, the speech of the temple religions that opened themselves to the cosmos but then fell silent before their own cosmograms; and, third, the speech of poetry which listened to nature but remained bound by nature.  “If we accept time as our father, we can free ourselves,” Rosenstock writes.  “If we make nature our mother, we remain enslaved to her.”[45]

Rosenstock expresses respect for the “the great speeches of art and ritual initiation” but believes, even so, that these have been “voided in the great divine ‘No” to all human artifice” that is spoken by and through the prophets of Israel.[46]  Israel, in his view, made a great religious discovery, as valid on its own terms as any scientific discovery, and as little to be rejected, because it arose among a particular people, as one would reject gravity because Newton was English, or the mathematical fecundity of the concept of zero because the idea was given its first systematic exposition by Brahmagupta in ancient India.  This discovery was “the God who beckons us from the end of time as the common destiny of mankind.”[47]  With the Incarnation, this discovery becomes the common possession of mankind.  “The eternal sameness of events ceases” and “the threshold of reality” is crossed.[48]  This is the implication, for Rosenstock, of a God who lives by dying.  “Death precedes birth,” Rosenstock says.  Christ absorbs all the great “speeches” of mankind – the speech of law and prophecy, art and ritual – and he unifies them by “empty[ing] himself of all of them.”  He is “the harvest of all times” and “the seed of a future” in which, as the apostle Paul says, God may be all in all.”[49]

 Rosenstock did not think that the coming of Christ as “the harvest of all times,” constituted a supersession, or replacement, of earlier forms of life and thought, as Christian triumphalists often supposed.  This was a point he discussed with his friend Rosenzweig in their wartime letters.  Rosenzweig had been on the brink of conversion to Christianity, but he had instead redoubled and redefined his commitment to Judaism, reaffirming the existence of the Jews as “the eternal people.”  He argued in his letters to Rosenstock that Israel must continue to send out “rays from the heart of the fire” until the day that “God is one and his name One.”[50]   (This sense of witness and chosen-ness was, for Rosenzweig, incompatible with Zionism, so, despite his sympathetic relations with friends like Martin Buber and Gershom Sholem who did become, with qualifications, Zionists, he remained what some have called a “non-Zionist,” i.e. an abstainer from Zionism rather than an “anti-Zionist.”)  Christianity, Rosenzweig thought, in undertaking to universalize the inspiration it shared with Judaism, had necessarily exposed itself to a series of “grand self-deceptions” which he summarized as an “attempt to take the Kingdom of Heaven by force.”  A universal religion would inevitably become an imperial religion and, as it spread, it would dissipate and volatilize becoming “more and more devoid of sensible perception and substance.”  Judaism as a “point of contraction and limitation” would then be “the guarantee of the reality of that [insensible] Christian world.”[51]  Time, Rosenzweig says in his Star of Redemption, “bounce[s] off …the Jewish people,” because they are called to live only in terms of their relationship to God.  As “the eternal people” they are oriented to the beginning and the end of time rather than to history.  (Zionism by “renationalizing” Judaism obviously departs from this understanding, which is why Rosenzweig stood aside.)  Christianity, in order to spread the word, must attempt “to gain…mastery over time.”[52]  Commanded to “preach to all nations” in the interval between “Christ come” and “Christ coming,” it is in constant danger of losing itself in its imperial and pedagogical mission.[53]  Corruptio optimi pessima.

Rosenzweig and Rosenstock’s dialogue was much more than an exchange of opinions.  Rosenstock, as we’ve heard, called it nothing less than “an exchange of life rhythms.”  In this exchange the two friends redefined the relationship between Judaism and Christianity as one of mutual support, each showing the other a potentially neglected side of its inspiration, each clarifying the other’s calling.  The Judaized Christianity that Rosenstock expounded to Rosenzweig when they first met became in Rosenzweig’s hands a Christianized Judaism.  Both were aspects of God’s revelation – one emphasized the eternal and exigent relationship of the Jewish people to the God who “beckons from the end of time,” one the universal mission and destiny this relationship implies.  Revelation was the keynote for both.  Both men believed that a new age was dawning in which revelation would, in Rosenzweig’s word, “absorb” philosophy.[54]  Rosenzweig shared this vision in his The Star of Redemption – a book he wrote in less than six months between August of 1918 and February 1919, its first sections composed on military postcards and mailed to his mother.  The work was composed under such pressing inspiration that Rosenstock said later that he thought that it had undermined his friend’s health and opened the door to the motor neuron disease that disabled him and led to his early death in 1929 at the age of 43.  Rosenstock would write about their shared vision for the rest of his life.

Central to this vision was the idea of speech thinking.  Rosenzweig expressed the germ of their shared idea quite succinctly in a supplement to The Star of Redemption that he wrote in 1925 called “The New Thinking.”  In this essay, Rosenzweig contrasts “the thinking thinker,” who had so far been the subject of philosophy, with what he calls the “language thinker, or alternately the “grammatical thinker.”[55]  “Thinking thinker[s]” have perfect access to their own thoughts.  They enter “philosophical discussion…knowing [their] thoughts in advance” and knowing them “exactly.”  They need only find the time and the words to express what they know.  This may not be easy – time is often short, words refractory – but it presents no difficulty in principle.  In principle the “thinking thinker’s” mind is transparent.  “Language thinkers,” says Rosenzweig, are in quite a different case.  They are able to know what they think only through the intermediation of some interlocutor.  Their thoughts do not already exist in some pure and essential form in advance of their expression – they take shape in an encounter with some other on whom they depend and for whom they can only wait and hope.  This means that they must also “take time seriously” – not as an inconvenient “noise” intruding on thought’s clear and timeless “signal” but as thought’s very condition.   The thinking thinker, self-sufficient in his truth, thinks “for no one” and speaks “to no one.”   The language thinker, on the other hand, must “speak to someone and think for someone, and this Someone is always a quite definite someone and has not only ears…but also a mouth.”

Franz Rosenzweig, like his friends Gershom Sholem and Walter Benjamin, had a mystical view of language.  He held that “The living language [is] constituted [by] the archetypal words which lie hidden under each and every manifest word…In living speech, these inaudible arch-words become audible as real words…In place of a language prior to language, we see before us real language.”[56]  Just as Galileo thought  that reality has a mathematical structure, so Rosenzweig, by assuming a “language prior to language,” supposed that reality has a linguistic structure.  The Gospel of John says the same with its resounding opening, “In the beginning was the Word.” 

This Word – logos in the New Testament’s original Greek – is obviously not a word on the level of carburetor or dish-soap.  In Rosenzweig’s way of speaking, it is an arch word, not an everyday word.  But an assertion is being made, nonetheless, that the world is spoken into being – the same claim that Genesis makes by its assertion that each thing that appeared was first “said” – “God said let there be light and there was light.”  Language to this way of thinking is primary and irreducible – it is the way in which the world is given to us.  This is what Heidegger means by saying that language is “the house of Being,” or Gadamer by his claim that there is no world without language, nor language without world.[57]    

The proto-scientists of the 17th century, like Francis Bacon, saw language as a defective and approximate medium, full of deceits and flattering illusions, and to be used only with great circumspection.  “Certain it is,” Francis Bacon wrote, that “words, as a Tartar’s bow, do shoot back upon the understanding of the wisest and mightily entangle and pervert the judgment.”[58]  Bacon and his successors believed that this difficulty could be overcome by the cultivation of an exacting and explicit style; and, when the Royal Society was formed in 1666 to pursue Bacon’s vision of a new science, its members were adjured by the society’s charter to write with “mathematical plainness.”[59]  Science would discern what Albert Einstein still dared to call “God’s thoughts” in the language of mathematics, not in words.[60]  Contemporary persons, whether dutifully “following science” or facing ostracization as “anti-science,” remain heirs to this view.  Rosenzweig and Rosenstock, with many others, tried to create a new foundation for thought.  They claimed that thinking “needs the other” and must “take… time seriously” by waiting on the other.  “In actual conversation,” Rosenzweig says, “something happens.  I do not know in advance what the other will say to me because I myself do not even know what I am going to say; perhaps not even whether I’m going to say anything at all.” [61]  They supposed, further, that language is thought’s “medium,” in the strong sense in which this term can be used after McLuhan’s the medium is the message.  Language not only carries thought, it conditions and engenders it.  Language, moreover, is shared.  It is not the solitary possession of the “thinking thinker” but belongs also to that “definite someone” who, as Rosenzweig says, has a mouth as well as ears.  So, not only must I wait for this other, I must also expect that when they show up, I may find, as Illich once said, that my words have been “turned around” in the other’s mouth.[62]  The “new thinking,” says Rosenzweig, is limited, particular, and contingent.  It is the thought of the world, and not, as he says, of the All.[63]

Rosenstock spelled out the implications of “speech thinking,” explicitly in books like Speech and Reality, The Origin of Speech, and The Fruit of Our Lips, and implicitly in more  politically and socially oriented works which still always insist on the primacy of speech – his Out of Revolution conceiving revolution as essentially a speech act; his Soziologie (rendered into English as In the Cross of Reality) claiming that “language does not describe – it creates – a before and after, as much as a here and now.”[64]  Grammar, Rosenstock says, is primary social science – the way in which society is made, the way in which it is lost, and the way in which it is renewed.[65]  “It [may] seem ridiculous,” he writes, “like shooting arrows at a battle ship,” to diagnose the “great calamities” of war and revolution and immiseration as “diseases of the circulation of speech.”  And yet, he argues, war ends in the writing of a peace treaty, revolution in the proclamation of a new order, immiseration in the restoration of credit – all “remedies are of a linguistic or a grammatical nature.”[66]  He does not, of course, intend the word grammar in the sense in which that word is now mainly used, when it is used at all.  Grammar was still part of the curriculum when I was at school, but it has since disappeared almost entirely.  And what I was taught, much as the proto-grammarian in me relished learning about gerunds and participles, vocatives and infinitives, was already, in Rosenstock’s words, “the dissection of a corpse.”  He called this tradition of autopsied language “Alexandrian grammar,” after a school of grammatical and philological study that flourished in Alexandria in the 2nd and 3rd centuries BCE.  Often taken as the origin of the Western study of grammar, these scholars, in Rosenstock’s view, looked at language from the standpoint of the spectator rather than the participant, and arrived at a detached and distanced view of  language’s instrumental functions – the anatomy of a corpse.  Rosenstock saw the elements, and moods, of grammar as integral parts of a living body – the very breath of life.  Language, for him, was only incidentally a tool we use to point at things.  What grammarians call the indicative mood in which we state facts – the mood of reality it’s sometimes called[67] - was for him the least of grammar’s moods.  Language is creative, long before it is indicative.  “Language,” he says, “is maternal…[It is] the womb of time in which man has been created and is constantly being recreated.”[68]

Rosenstock’s sense of language traces back to the 18th century philosophical maverick J.G. Hamann.  “The whole ability to think,” Hamann wrote, “rests upon language…language is the sole instrument and criterion of reason…Without language there can be no reason.”  Using the same words that Rosenstock would later choose, Hamann calls language “the mother of reason and revelation, its Alpha and Omega.” For Hamann, therefore, “The question is not so much: What is reason? but rather: What is language?”[69]  Hamann sometimes wrote under the pen-name Magus des Nordens [the magus of the north], and when Rosenstock was given an honorary degree in theology by the University of Münster in 1959, the citation proclaimed him the new Magus des Nordens.  Many others have also advanced Hamann’s once eccentric view.  Nietzsche’s epigram in  – “I am afraid we are not getting rid of God, because we still believe in grammar” – gives the same idea in a nutshell.  Elsewhere, Nietzsche speaks of “the unconscious domination and guidance of grammatical functions,” which also says that we think as we speak, rather speak as we think.[70]  In the 20th century this sense of language becomes relatively common.  The French linguist and semiotician, Émile Beneviste, for example, says: “We can only grasp thought that has already been fitted into the framework of a language…What it is possible to say delimits and organizes what it is possible to think.  Language provides the fundamental configuration of the properties that the mind recognizes things to possess.”[71]  Rosenstock certainly belong to this “linguistic turn,” as it’s sometimes called, but he occupies a distinctive place within it.  Like Hamann, who says that “creation is a speech,” Rosenstock holds that “God is the speaking voice” and is perceptible to us only as “the pure act of speech.”[72] 

A crucial aspect of speech thinking is its insuperably temporal character.  It “takes time seriously,” as Rosenzweig says, and must take time seriously because time is its very horizon and limit. “The Alpha and Omega from which I grasp everything afresh,” says Rosenstock with reference to this temporal character of his thought, is the idea that things are grasped consecutively and one at a time, not all at once.[73]  Hamann, again of one mind with Rosenstock, says that he “know[s] of no eternal truths save those which are unceasingly temporal.”[74]  Modernity has been relentlessly spatializing.  From René Descartes’ mathesis universalis – “there must be a general science which explains all the points that can be raised concerning order and measure irrespective of the subject-matter, and…this science should be termed mathesis universalis[75] - to Francis Bacon’s intention to discover “the latent schematism in bodies,” the ambition has been to lay out the world before our eyes and bring it under our control.[76]  Today in the era of risk management, decision trees, and global simultaneity, time seems to have been converted almost entirely into space – into something that can be divided and counted, anticipated and overseen.  The experience of time as duration and flow, as thinkers from French philosopher Henri Bergson to Canadian economist Harold Innis have lamented, tends to evaporate for modern persons.[77]  But speech takes time.  A marriage vow, as Rosenstock says, may take a lifetime to understand.  Thousands of years may elapse between a command or a promise and its fulfilment.[78]  Things change in time.  What was once compelling loses its authority.  Even “sacred names,” Rosenstock says, “have a limited span of life” and require renewal.[79]

What time is in itself is a mystery – perhaps the fundamental mystery of our fleeting existence.  “What is time?” Augustine asks in his Confessions. “Provided that no one asks me, I know.  If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know.”[80]  We know insofar as we experience time; we don’t know in the sense that time is the very condition of our having experience at all.  Time is our nature, Rosenstock says.  English poet William Blake, in a favourite formulation of mine, calls time “the mercy of eternity” – the way in which the whole is reduced to a tolerable and comprehensible sequence.  Else, Blake goes on, “all were eternal torment.”[81]  Western philosophy, in Rosenstock’s estimation, has been a prolonged revolt against this providential limitation of our knowledge – a revolt he traces all the way back to Parmenides (circa 500 BCE), sometimes called the founder, or father, of ontology after his attempt to grasp the nature of Being.  Being, as totality, says Rosenstock, was an “unfortunate idea” which has “tortured philosophers” ever since.[82]   In Being, the world stands still and becomes an abstract projection in space of what can only be experienced in time.  The dumbfounded subject, in contemplating this remote abstraction, loses its object.  The mind grows attached to what the body can never experience.  And nature and society are “forever split,” with nature becoming a “speechless physis” in which speaking society is anomalous.  A “metaphysical prison” is constructed.[83]  This, in a way, is Nietzsche’s complaint against metaphysics: that a soon as we propose that a “true” world – “unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable” - lies behind and beyond this apparent one, we create a situation where what is given depends for its reality on what is put out of reach, and where nihilism will ensue, should the “true” world be unmasked or put in doubt.[84]  This is the heritage of all post-metaphysical philosophy.  As Hannah Arendt puts it: “What has come to an end [in our time] is the basic distinction between the sensory and the suprasensory together with the notion…that whatever is not given to the senses – God or Being or the First Principles and Causes (archai) or the Ideas – is more real, more truthful, more meaningful than what appears.”[85]  But, Rosenstock reacts to this situation very differently than, say, Heidegger.  Heidegger wants to revive “the question of Being,” and enwrap the earth in the timeless ahistoricity of the Fourfold.[86]  Rosenstock, on the other hand, declares that the question of Being is simply “silly” and quite “unanswerable.” (One of his most charming essays is an imagined letter from Heraclitus to Parmenides – the two were contemporaries, though there’s no evidence they were acquainted – in which Heraclitus tries to talk Parmenides out of the whole idea.)  What Rosenstock emphasizes, first of all, is the loss of time, when the sentiment of existence is extended into an all-at-once apprehension of the whole, and, second, the loss of the creative, engendering quality of speech, when it is swallowed up in “speechless physis.”  Time was excluded from philosophy from the outset.  “From Thales to Hegel all philosophy began its thinking with the world of space, or the knowing mind and a corresponding logic of timeless abstraction.”[87] But, we cannot ascertain what is, Rosenstock says, apart from our speaking of it.  Only by speech can we “order and obey, listen and reply, sing and meditate, narrate and worship, analyze and judge.”[88] 

Time, in Rosenstock’s thought, is the creation of speech.  He does not mean that speech creates the mysterious, given time that Augustine can experience but not explain, but that it creates the time in which a society lives and acts, and without which it can do neither.  Speech establishes the present, he says… 

Only because we speak are we able to establish a present moment between past and future.  [Only] because I am telling you all this here and am waiting for your answer, is it possible for you and me to forget past and future, and to call this hour an hour, this paper a unity, this time one moment, one time span.  By human speech, space and time are created. The scientific notions of time and space are secondary abstractions of the reality of grammatical time and space.[89] 

“The scientific notions of time and space” are the descendants of Parmenides’ attempt to imagine Nature as a static whole, governed by those immutable “laws” that Einstein took for “God thoughts.”  Rosenstock evokes a created world, undergoing continual recreation.  In this dynamic creation speech sets the parameters, creating what Rosenstock, rather wonderfully, calls “time cups” – the eras and epochs in which we act imagined as vessels or containers.  Revolutions create new time cups – they invent new futures, new pasts, and new necessities.  But the idea of the time cup as the named intervals in which cultures live has more everyday implications as well.  Think of the vexed discussions that currently go on with regard to the Enlightenment.  Whether you think we have betrayed it or overcome it, whether you would like it restore or erased, you must first take for granted that the Enlightenment is, as one now says, a thing.  A hundred other examples would do as well.  Speak of “the 60’s” and you are instantly buried in an avalanche of accumulated cultural debris.  Speak of the Middle Ages, and you unthinkingly minimize the aboriginal importance of Christianity in shaping the modern West, substituting in its place a story about how the glorious ideals of pagan antiquity slumbered through a theocratic interruption until they were reawakened at the Renaissance. 

Rosenstock illustrated how revolutions write their stories by the case of the French Revolution.    In the early years of the 19th century its inheritors invented the Renaissance, transforming the horrifying decadence of the Inquisition, the Hammer of the Witches, and the corrupt Florence of the Medicis into a sunlight rebirth.[90]  An infrastructure of museums and university chairs was created to bring the concept of the Renaissance to life.  This was done, Rosenstock claims, in order to erase the French Revolution’s debt to the Reformation.  The giant papier maché image of Robespierre in a toga that supposedly commanded the first Festival of the Supreme Being – the story is disputed – supports this idea.  Robespierre and his fellows, this image showed, had nothing to do with Christian superstition – they were the heirs rather of noble Romans.  In this way, argues Rosenstock, “The deep shadows of that dying age” – e.g. Quatrocento Italy – were banished.[91]  The point, as is usual with Rosenstock, is polemical and provocative, but also illuminating and unsettling.  His analysis tends to dissolve the seemingly solid forms projected by a reified historical imagination and shows us instead time in its molten state before it has hardened into some authoritative, and eventually obvious account – a certainty, as Illich liked to say.

A time cup is a span of time – an age, an era, an epoch – that is organized and oriented by “the right names” spoken at “the right time” and “in the right place.”[92]  Such a cup is “formed by imperatives.”  Here the old soldier comes into view, watching men die unquestioningly at a word of command, perhaps issuing such orders himself.  He might have reasoned, of course, that no such word should ever again be spoken, and hoped for “perpetual peace,”[93] but his reflection forced him to the opposite conclusion: that human beings will always be under orders. “No authentic life,” he writes, “can step into the world except under command.”[94] His teaching here is easy to mistake, but I don’t think it reflects any willingness whatever to exercise or submit to authoritarian rule.  “Under command” speaks of a call which compels us by its inherent quality – of beauty, of necessity, of timeliness.  We cannot be called, unless we have first been addressed by a name we recognize.  Here we again encounter Rosenstock’s conception of grammar as a system of social relations and his idea of speech as “the lifeblood of society.”[95]  Grammar, as we have known it, if we have known it all, has emphasized indicative moods - a kind of dulled pointing at what is – the anatomy, as he says, “of a corpse.”  His grammar begins with commanding and calling, naming and singing – the functions by which an order of things is brought into existence – and only comes much later to the ways in which it is narrated and systematized. 

A second consideration bearing on his assertion that a time cup, as a lighted and limited field of action, is brought into being by an imperative, is his understanding of the Gospel as a vocation.  When Jesus begins teaching, his auditors are said to be “astonished.”  “For his word was with authority,” Luke’s gospel says. [96]  (The King James translation says with power].  The power and authority of his word consisted not just in its reference but in its speaker actually being what he announced.  He was, and is the Word of God. (This was always Illich’s preferred name for his Lord, as well as Rosenstock’s.)  But to hear this word required a death and rebirth – sometimes an actual death, sometimes what might be called a social death – a dying to what the Gospel calls “the world,” as in “my kingdom is not of this world,” or “be not conformed to this world.”[97]  “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies,” Jesus says, “it remains alone.  But, if it dies, it bears much fruit.”[98] This was a crucial teaching for Rosenstock, and he insisted again and again on what might be called the priority of death.  “Death precedes birth,” he says, and our very souls are constituted by “the power of transforming an end into a beginning.”[99]  Such things are hard to say in a time when death has become an obscenity – something to be kept off the scene as long as possible and then, in the last resort, sweetly administered by the agents of a caring state – but such was Rosenstock’s view.  Only a word into which we can die, and for which we will die, has that imperative power that he says founds an era.  “Christianity is essentially war in peace,” he wrote.  “It distributes the sacrifice characteristic of war through “the whole fabric of life.”[100]

Earlier, I quoted historian of religions Mircea Eliade’s claim that Christianity’s most striking innovation was its “valorization of time,” and its “redemption of…history.”[101]  This was an innovation about which Eliade himself was ambivalent.  He was a man who wanted to “kill time,” as a wittily titled recent article about him put it, seeking an escape from “the terrors of history” through a renewed understanding of myth and ritual as our access to the never-changing, but Rosenstock regards the revelation that time is real and unrepeatable as the very essence of the Gospel.[102]  One of the greatest of Christianity’s many scandals is its claim that that the Incarnation of God occurred at a certain time, in a certain place, among a certain people.  Does this partiality and particularity not mock the very idea of a God of all?  Why not among the Chinese or the Maya, the Magyars or the Saxons, the Haida or the Yoruba?  Simone Weil, though a fervent Christian who felt that Christ had “taken possession” of her, could not accept the idea of the Incarnation as a unique historical happening. [103]  “Chronology,” she writes, “cannot play a decisive role in a relationship between God and man, one of whose terms is eternal.  If the redemption [promised in Christ] had not been present on this earth from the very beginning, it would not be possible to pardon God…for the affliction of so many innocent people, so many people uprooted, enslaved, tortured and put to death in the course of centuries preceding the Christian era.  Christ is present on this earth…wherever there is affliction.”[104]  “It is impossible,” she declares axiomatically, “that the whole truth should not be present at every time and every place, available to anyone who desires it.”[105]  Christ, for her, is the epitome of God’s love, and its consummate expression, but his appearance as the son of Mary cannot be a purely or uniquely historical event.  “The content of Christianity existed before Christ,” she concludes, for God’s love must be distributed equally everywhere, as “impartial as sunlight.”[106]  This is not Rosenstock’s view, and neither is it Illich’s, which may help to explain why Illich kept his distance from Weil, despite the keen enthusiasm of some of his closest friends – Lee Hoinacki, notably – for her philosophy.  ‘When Mary brought forth the Word of God in the flesh,” Illich asserts, “something happened cosmically…From that moment on, any prophetic act or word is not only a hope but faith in the carnal presence of God.”[107]  Rosenstock is equally clear that the Incarnation is a unique and decisive event – occurring, one could say, within history, except this is the event which invents history and makes every subsequent moment of time pregnant with a significance it previously lacked.  “The eternal sameness of events ceases,” Rosenstock writes, “the threshold of reality” opens, and nature, spirit and culture become “bearers of reality.”[108]

According to Rosenstock, “Jesus completed the revelation of the living God because he created true future.”[109] (my italics) Religion, in recurrent time, was oriented always to an origin and to a restoration of primeval harmony.  In the Incarnation, Rosenstock  thinks, God speaks from the future, of a condition not yet created.  Now, there can be, as Illich puts it, “a tomorrow” which “no longer turns in a circle with yesterday” but is instead “totally surprising”[110]  This is an idea, says Rosenstock, that is hateful to “all natural minds” – minds that think for themselves, uninformed by what only God can reveal.  Such minds must reject “the idea that a new language should start right here and now” because this idea will necessarily void the authority of some cherished past – the authority, he says, of “their great literatures and codes and manuals of science and Emily Posts.”[111]  This faith that there can be something new – something surprising, in Illich’s way of speaking – is what makes Christianity, for Rosenstock, the matrix of revolution, and the beginning of what he calls “time thinking.” The Cross, he says, will “finally penetrate into the last stronghold of paganism” only when “time-speakers” replace “space-thinkers.”[112]  

The Incarnation, in Rosenstock’s eyes, reveals how things are – it is a clarification of existence, more than a plan of salvation. This is true with regards to language. The premise of universality in Christianity implied translation, and translation implies an underlying unity of all tongues – the revelation of language itself as the unity of all languages.  “Two thousand years ago,” he says… 

…an utterly new phase of speech was entered upon.  Never since has any speaking group of the human race based its existence on the fact of one individual language.  A new principle was proclaimed: all languages may be translated into each other.  Practically speaking, all languages rest on the common basis of translations of the Bible.  Today the fermentation of all natural languages through this central leaven of the universal Bible and the universal science has transformed the languages.  They no longer can be considered separate individualities.  They are becoming varieties and idioms and seceders.[113] 

Language for Rosenstock is revelation.  It is not merely a medium – more or less serviceable – in which revelation is conveyed, but the thing itself when properly understood.  In the beginning was the Word.  The case is the same with Hamann, in the passage I quoted earlier, in which he says, “With me the question is not so much: What is reason? but rather: What is language?”  For Rosenstock, “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."[114]  He expresses this primacy and priority of the spoken in many ways.  “God is not an object but a person, and He has not a concept but a name.[115]  “God…is the pure act of speech,” and, as such, “has no visible existence.”[116]  God is “the power who makes us speak.”  And “the very name of God means he who speaks.”[117]  These statements will not be easily understood by the “space thinker,” and, insofar as spatialization – the priority of space over time – is a contemporary fate more than a choice, that means pretty well everyone living within the horizons of a technological society.  When Rosenstock says that God is a name in which we do things, rather than a concept, it’s hard for those who believe that truth must finally be visible and demonstrable, if only to “the mind’s eye,” not to hear “just a name,” or “only a name.”   In this sense, Rosenstock presents a new way of thinking, which as speech thinking is separable from time thinking.  This new way of thinking has been intimated many times during the last century – from Harold Innis’s “Plea for Time” to the “linguistic turn” in philosophy – but will remain subject to constant reabsorption and redomestication so long as prediction, surveillance and control remain the default modes of social awareness.[118] 

In the Book of Exodus, when Moses is tending his father-in-law Jethro’s flock of sheep and goats, he comes across an angel of the Lord who appears to him “in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush.”  Moses approaches the bush which is “burning but not consumed” and hears God speaking out of the bush.  God tells Moses to lead the Israelites out of their captivity in Egypt.  Moses asks how he shall answer if the people ask him the name of the one who has sent him.  God replies, “I am who I am” – a translation that began with St. Jerome’s Ego sum qui sum, persisted in Luther, Tyndale and most subsequent modern versions, and resounded through Western philosophy and theology, enabling Augustine and, after him, Aquinas to  identify God as the Being of beings – Esse ipsum subsistens. [119]   But when Franz Rosenzweig undertook to translate the Hebrew Bible into modern German, along with Martin Buber who completed the project after Rosenzweig’s early death, the two men rendered this saying as, “I will be who I will be.”  Ancient Hebrew which didn’t employ tenses, but instead distinguished “actions that have been completed [from] actions that are not yet completed,” allows this interpretation of God’s equivocation.[120]  The same note is sounded later in the Exodus when God “goes before” the Israelites, appearing by day as a “pillar of cloud,” by night at a “pillar of fire.”  In both cases God appears as an action completing itself rather than as a ascertainable being.  This I think is what Rosenstock means in saying that God is a name for what happens over time in that name.  Moses receives a call, and he must answer, yes or no, without knowing the beginning or the end.  The fishermen, Peter and Andrew, hear only, “Follow me.”[121]  Who is speaking is what will be revealed, but only as an event in time, not as a visible and searchable structure in space.

This is the first way in which the Incarnation discloses how things are – it makes plain the centrality and universality of the Word – the word which sounds as the call of the not-yet or the still-to-be-completed – Rosenstock’s “true future” – and requires obedient listening.  The second way is through the image of the Cross – the image by which Rosenstock hoped to create a new sociology.  Just as he conceived grammar as a mirror of social relations, so he considered the Cross a mirror of the fundamental duality of a world in which “primordial forces” are always and inevitably pitted against one another.  “All knowledge,” he says “[bears] the mark of dialectical contradiction.  In thinking man is compelled to oppose one thing to its contrast; black calls for white, male for female, yes for no and so on, ad infinitum.”[122]  “Every spontaneous intellectual activity splits up into opposites and opponents.”[123]  And so “contrariety,” as I quoted earlier, is “the only bridge that leads to the whole.”[124]

Reality, as Rosenstock understands it, is cruciform – cross-shaped.  We are caught between two times, the past and the future, and two spaces, the inner and the outer – each exerting its contradictory demand.  Our decisions are made in the dark – each road shadowed by the one we did not take, each word haunted by the one we did not speak.  In thinking we “double” ourselves – each one becoming their own listener – so we must always be “of two minds.”[125]  In a lecture at Dartmouth, he put it to young men he was teaching this way:

…the purposive man…the passionate man…is [cut in] half.  [Because he] must be able to talk to himself, he is two… In posing the question to yourself, “What shall I do?” you are conversing with yourself.  You are two in one.  All mind, all mental processes…lead to schizophrenia if they go on… unhampered, so to speak, because they invite…us to discuss the problem inside ourselves…The mind is always two because doubt is essential to the mind.  And doubt means to… place a question which can be answered one way or the other.  Therefore, you retain two voices inside yourself: one pleading one course, one pleading the other.  All argument is plaintiff and defendant.  And you must be the judge.  And that is the terrible thing of the mental processes – that they always end in alternatives, you see.  We are torn.  So, the thinking man, gentlemen, is two.  The passionate man is half.[126]  

In the sign of the cross, we suffer division, and experience the wholeness that comes from sustaining that division. 

Our self-division is patent in the case of time.  For him, “the essence of time is transition” – one time is perpetually becoming another, and, consequently, “we always come too late to ourselves.”  It might be said that we are born too late inasmuch as we are born into a world which has always already assumed a determined shape without us, a world with which our very novelty - our natality, as Hannah Arendt says – must make us disagree.[127]  No one ever expressed the thought more wonderfully than William Blake in his poem Infant Sorrow (with his spelling and punctuation)…

My mother groand! my father wept
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud;
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

 Struggling in my fathers hands:
Striving against my swaddling bands:
Bound and weary I thought best
To sulk upon my mothers breast.

Blake’s squalling fiend is what Rosenstock calls a distemporary, an embodiment of a new time restively encountering an old time, a new form bound within an old form.  The world, for Rosenstock is full of distemporaries, which is why he found it necessary to coin a new word for the clash of times that so preoccupied him.  Teachers are distemporary with their students, parents distemporary with their children, though both are usually bound “under the fiction that they [are] contemporaries and [can] feel and think the same things.”[128]  When he returned from the front in Germany in 1918, he found himself distemporary with those who had not shared his experience.  He watched the same disjunction in the United States after the Second World War, as veterans returned from hellish scenes of battle to peaceful, uncomprehending communities.  The problem he posed was how a present was to be established within which disjoint times and disparate experiences could be held together.  This, he thought, was the task of proper, fitting and timely speech – to unify and integrate, synchronize and coordinate – but this task could only be carried out where the supposed contemporaries had first recognized one another as actual distemporaries.  What prevented this recognition, in his view, was what he called monism, and more specifically “the fighting monism of the army of enlightenment.”  Monism, for him, is the illusion of unity – the pretense that we can comprehend our world in one synoptic look, or one speechless abstraction, whether it be called science or reason or something else.  Reality for him is best represented by the cross whose opposed arms speak of unity in opposition, rebirth in death.  Against monism he asserts what he calls Christian dualism.  He defines it as the ability to recognize and accept, in the image of the cross, the unavoidable duality of love and law, repetition and surprise, custom and revelation.[129]  Only in this sign, and the speech it makes possible, could those who lacked a common history or a common social pattern – thinker and soldier, parent and child, man and woman, amateur and expert – join in “one spirit” and in “one common sense.”[130]

To some this may sound like Christian chauvinism in a new key – a more existentialist apology for what Christians have claimed all along – that their truth is the truth. Perhaps it is, but, before that can be judged, I think it’s first necessary to understand just how new and how different this new key really is.  Rosenstock, to begin, is a completely non-metaphysical thinker.  If we take Nietzsche’s definition of metaphysics, as the belief that this world is only the flickering shadow of some true and unchanging reality that lies behind it, then Rosenstock emphatically believes in one, indivisible world.  Christianity’s primary images, for him, refer not to some other world but to what happens in this world.  In an address to the Dartmouth faculty in 1941, Rosenstock said: 

I know of the Last Judgment as a reality because I have seen Last Judgments passed on Proust’s France, on Rasputin’s Russia, on Wilhelm II’s Germany, President Harding’s America.  Similarly, I believe in resurrection of the body because I see resurrections of bodies all through history, on earth. Any genuine soul will be incarnated time and again.[131] 

William Blake in his notes for his engraving of The Last Judgment presents a similarly incarnational understanding of what this figure means.  “…Whenever any Individual Rejects Error and Embraces Truth,” he writes, “a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual.”[132]  Last judgments occur not after time, but within time, and not once but repeatedly.  Hamann says the same, in a passage I quoted in part earlier: “I know of no eternal truths save those which are unceasingly temporal.”  This means, Hamann  goes on, that he has no need to second guess God – “to mount into the cabinet of the divine understanding” – nor even to “linger over the difference” between what he calls “direct revelation” – the sensible here and now – and the testimony of Scripture, because in the end “the spirit of observation and the spirit or prophecy are expressions of a single positive power.”  The world is one – “Everything is divine…but everything divine is also human.”[133]  Rosenstock says just the same.  What both call for is a revaluation of time and history, not the acceptance of a timeless doctrine. 

In Rosenstock’s thought, all the major figures of Christian faith appear not as singular events – the resurrection of the dead, the second coming – but as recurrences within time and as “silhouettes” – Hamann’s word – of an underlying mystery.  “History is not a process or development – it is what happens to us now,” Hamann says.  “All alike,” he says, ‘’are near history’s beginning and history’s end” – as near now as we will ever be.  This goes further than Rosenstock whose “time cups” do establish a sequence that Hamann’s perpetual now might seem to deny.  But both agree that history only becomes real when we are able to discern through its shadows the outlines of a more enduring order.  And both agree that these signs are presented to us in and through language – the power by which we make history in the first place.  Apocalypse, therefore, is not some cosmic catastrophe that will destroy the creation and make way for “a new heaven and a new earth,” but rather a continuous revelation of what happens when God enters time and the Word becomes flesh.

Religions are often understood as presenting competing and incompatible claims about a supernatural reality in which we must choose to believe or not.  Questions about religious belief, and who has it or who has lost it, are often posed in such horizons.  Is God still up there on his heavenly throne or not?  Yes or no.  But this understanding of religion as an objective cosmology in which one must believe or disbelieve, or indeed as an account of any object whatsoever, will seriously mislead us in Rosenstock’s case.  “Speculations over God and the world are almost always idle,” he says, “the thoughts of…spectators of the theater of life.  ‘Is there a God?’ ‘Has man a soul?’  ‘Why must we die?’  ‘How many hairs has the devil’s grandmother?’ ‘When is the Day of Judgment?’ – all these are idle questions, and one fool can ask more of them than a hundred wise men can answer.”[134]   He is equally scathing about dogma.  “Christianity did not come into the world to teach anything,” he insists. “It is not a doctrine.  It came to reveal something: the connection of death and life.”[135] Rosenstock’s Christianity is entirely acosmic and presents no speculation about some ultimate or transcendent state of things.  Ultimacy, for him, is a word, a call, a command – to which we respond or fail to respond – just that.  This is religion, as far as he is concerned, but, since this is not what the word is usually taken to mean, it would be premature to conclude that he is promoting any religion whatsoever in the usual sense.  For Rosenstock, religion points us to a decision which we will make in time, and in our actual circumstances, not to some private reality.  “God has no dealings with you privately,” he says bluntly.[136] Religion, for him, pertains to a community, and a people.  “Private religion is no religion,” he writes, “it is its stump…Any community must have religion, must have the power which binds it together for better or worse, and therefore it must create holidays [i.e. holy days] or cease to be a community.”[137]

“Every value in human history,” Rosenstock writes, “is first set on high by one single event which lends its name and gives meaning to later events.  Every ‘a’ has to be preceded by a creative ‘the’.”[138]  This saying echoes remarks I quoted earlier on the importance of the founding word – the word, or words, spoken at the right time, which sets a tone and a tenor for an ensuing order.  Jesus is the Christ and “his divinity must be sustained,” because he is not a man, but the man, “the one unique event [that] must precede the many” – the pattern of the era he initiated.[139]  What Jesus initiates is “a process of making Man like God” – a process recognized by many of the Church Fathers and summarized in Athanasius’s formula: “He became what we are that we might become what he is.”  “Christ [as] the center of history,” says Rosenstock, “enables us to participate consciously in this man-making process and to study its laws.”[140]  God and humanity, in this perspective are inseparable – an indissoluble, mutually defining couplet.  They can be distinguished but never divided.  This is not a statement about what God and humanity are in themselves – it is rather a dramatic refusal of the premise that anything can exist or be known in itself.  This is the premise that the natural philosophers who invented what we now call Science surreptitiously borrowed from their conceptualized God:  the premise that they could freeze the world in their objectifying gaze and make it yield up its laws and its secrets. But this God, according to Rosenstock, is not the Living God:

The Living God… revealed by Jesus must be forever distinguished from the merely conceptual God of philosophers.  Most atheists deny God because they look for Him in the wrong way.  He is not an object but a person, and He has not a concept but a name.  To approach him as an object of theoretical discussion is to defeat the quest from the start.  Nothing but the world of space is given in this manner.  Nobody can look at God as an object.  God looks at us and has looked at us before we open our eyes or our mouths.  He is the power that makes us speak.  He puts words of life on our lips.[141]

“Not an object but a person…not a concept but a name” – it passes easily enough, but it challenges what remains the default mode of modern thinking at its very foundation.  By default I mean the mode to which people unconsciously revert, particularly in times of perceived crisis.  Think of all the former critics of science who obediently “followed science” during the recent pandemic, or the skeptics of genetic technologies who proclaimed an untried and barely tested genetic vaccine as “safe and effective” prima facie.  Or consider all the current bloviation in polite circles about misinformation – it presumes, without thinking, that a secure objectivity which can underwrite trusted news is within our reach and that “we” need to get back to this stable foundation.  But where does this confidence come from?  Does it not rest finally on a displaced and unrecognized theology – a God who has entered “society” as the promise of equality and objectivity, science and self-creating nature.  Religion, in Rosenstock’s definition, is whatever someone will stake their life on.  “The religion of a man,” he writes very simply, “rests on the names that induce him to act jointly with others.”[142]   At the moment, what seems to induce joint action in Western societies is the promise of a revived modernity – whether it’s the hyper-equality of the woke, the renewed greatness of the American republic, or the repristinated objectivity of trusted news – all promise to take us back to some reliable foundation, and none recognize a displaced God - what Bruno Latour calls the “crossed out God”[143] – in this foundation.  “Modern man is not so much godless as polytheistic,” Rosenstock suggests.  “His life is split between many gods – or ‘values,’ as it has become fashionable to call them.”[144]  But these “multiplex deities” all stand behind, rather than before us.  We want to get back to them and are, therefore, Rosenstock says, pagan. 

Rosenstock proposes a radically different vision.  A critical element of this vision is the idea that humanity is inseparable from God, and that God, from the human point  of view, is inseparable from the creation and the creature by whom God is made known.  “Man by himself is an abstraction,” Hamann says, “it is only man with God who is truly human.”[145]  God, for Rosenstock, is the inspiration of our speech, and the power that creates, binds and recreates societies.  It is what calls us into existence, and allows us to form the temporal horizons – the time cups – in which we can respond to our calling.  These are the horizons and limits of our understanding.  Time and death are their seal.  As mortal creatures in time, we cannot know more, but can only trust that the words that are “put on our lips,” are “the words of life.”    But, according to Rosenstock, philosophy since the time of Parmenides has misled us into various vain imaginings of the eternity of the extended, or spatialized world.  Philosophy, of course, seems a weak word here, insofar as it now evokes an arcane academic pursuit that most can live perfectly well without.  But for Rosenstock, it stands for the fatal hubris that has brought the world to the edge of the precipice on which it is currently poised: the idea that a stable, total, and unified apprehension of things is available to human beings.  This thought runs from Thales of Miletus (c. 625-545 B.C.E.) who supposed, for the first time, that one ultimate substance must underlie all of Nature, all the way to Einstein, with his assurance that his science could make him privy to “God’s thoughts.”[146]  It underwrites every ism that pretends to encompass the world in one philosophy.  It is built into our assumption that the social and political worlds in which we live are all of one consistency.  It supports our confidence in techno-science as a uniquely privileged access to the nature of things.  But reality is divided and torn, contradiction is a formative and creative power, and people do not speak one language, even though they may be “one crew on one boat.”[147] People cannot live with just “one philosophy,” Rosenstock says, because “all philosophies are partial…” – they show us one thing only to hide another – and “the human soul is challenged today to see the relativity of all philosophical systems” as never before.[148]    Christianity, for him, is neither an idealism, nor a philosophy, it is an “onslaught on philosophy.”[149]

What comes after philosophy, for Rosenstock, can only be called “revelation,” but not in the fundamentalist sense in which this word is sometimes used – as if God’s word were an unchanging formula and unalterable text, always in the past and always in need of recovery or restoration.  Rosenstock saw Incarnation as a continuing and ramifying process.  It had, as we have seen, a unique and authoritative beginning in the Christ – one and only – but it also developed and changed through time.  In his own time, Rosenstock held that Christianity was “bankrupt,” as it had “repeatedly” been in the past.[150]  His view on this point echoed G.K. Chesterton who also held that “Christianity has died many times and risen again, for it had a God who knew his way out of the grave,” and that when it revived it did so “not as an old religion but as a new religion.”[151]  Christianity, in this sense, could not be “saved,” Rosenstock said, because that would be “unchristian” in a religion that teaches that  “whoever wants to save his life will lose it,” and that makes the success through failure of the Crucifixion  its very paradigm of worldly action.  But it could “begin again” and endlessly had begun again.[152]  He did not consider this “progress” exactly, since he rejected a view of history as progress in the usual sense of a steady improvement.  He saw it rather as resurrection.  “The future does not stay open automatically,” he writes; it has to be reopened by your inward death and renewal.”  Consequently, a “man’s life must be neither linear nor spiral [the usual images of progress] but crucial [the image of the cross].”[153]

Rosenstock, as my reader may already have gathered, is something of an evangelist.  He says as much himself when he states that, “A Christian who does not make converts is no Christian”[154]  His book The Christian Future even has a chapter entitled “The Economy of Salvation” – a phrase apt to alarm contemporary readers, along with cognates like “the divine economy” or “the plan of salvation.”  These phrases can seem to despise the misery and suffering of so many during the implementation of the plan, and to imply that the terrors of history, as well as the devastations of fire and flood, landslide and earthquake, extinction and ice age, are just by-effects and incidental costs of a finely tuned celestial scheme – that God knows what he likes, and who he likes, and shrugs off false starts, blind alleys, and other forms of collateral damage.  On top of that, Giorgio Agamben and Nicholas Heron, among others, have also shown that attempts to reason out the nature of divine government are the thought-forms out of which modern ideas of politics and economy will grow.[155]  Nevertheless, Rosenstock persists in the idea that “Christ began a life process which has continually transformed us and the world we live in” and dares to call this “the story” and even “the economy of salvation.” Without this conviction, he claims, “true faith is dead.”[156]  That this is a Western-centric, and Judaeo-Christian-centric view of history hardly needs saying, but, once again, it’s necessary to understand what Rosenstock means, before taking up this apparent ethnocentricism.

His first claim is that “the story of salvation” cannot be, as he says, “a recondite discovery of scholars,” but must be a truth “so simple that any schoolboy can understand it.”  He puts it in one sentence: “The story of salvation on earth is the advance of the singular against the plural.”  “Salvation,” he goes on, “came into a world of many gods, many lands, many peoples.  Over against each of these it sets up a singular: one God, one world, one humankind.”[157]  This is pretty obviously not a doctrinal, or even a cultural claim.  Its one irreducibly “chauvinist” element is the claim that the seed of human unity was first planted in a definite time and place – that the Christ was the flowering and fulfilment of Israel’s religious genius and no other.

For the rest, Rosenstock shared the view of many of his contemporaries that  Christianity is not a religion, like other religions, but something more like the simultaneous fulfilment and abolition of religion – a splitting of the atom of religion which releases its immense pent-up power and puts it, for good and ill, into the hands of humanity.  Rene Girard says something like this with his claim that the Crucifixion breaks the mould of all previous mythologies.  So do the many other Christians who say that Christianity is not a set of beliefs or practices so much as a relationship – an orientation to the living God.  Illich often argued – in his early writings on mission, in Gender, and in his recorded conversations with me – that the Gospel could have been, and should have been, a leaven and a supplement to the world’s many religions not their replacement.  The Romanesque churches of the first millennium, he argued in Gender, remained quite hospitable to the dragons, river gods, green men, and other local spirits of pre-Christian Europe.  The pre-Gothic church he said still “blessed everything” – Ecclesia omnia benedicat – and took the view that the Christian God was deus deorum – a serene God of gods, rather than their competitor.[158]  In The Rivers North of the Future, in answer to my question as to whether “the Good News could have been preached without the loss of proportions,” i.e. the loss of the genius of place in religion, he answers, Yes, and then adds ruefully “ but it was not God’s will.”[159]  The French priest and scholar Henri de Lubac says the same as Illich.  The Church, he says, is, or ought to be, catholic in that word’s etymological sense: universal.  “There was no need for the Church to repudiate the harmony between the earth and the cosmos…The church gather[s] to her vast treasury riches rescued from all sides…She made a halo for the Sun of Justice out of the glory of the Sol Invictus [and] adorn[ed] her cathedrals with the signs of the Zodiac, harmonizing her ceremonies with the rhythm of the seasons.”[160]

None of this is to say, of course, that Christianity did not become a typical religion, and an imperial ideology, but only to suggest that Christianity had, from the outset, another side, and to align Rosenstock with the contemporary movement to recover this original vision, and to free him from any suggestion of sectarian purpose.   In his book The Christian Future, Rosenstock vindicates his view that “the last two thousand years have really been the story of man’s salvation” by first allowing that “faith is intermittent” and second that “Christianity does not abolish sin and death but overcomes them.”[161]  These are both weighty provisos, particularly the second, with its subtle distinction between abolishing and overcoming – what does that mean exactly? – and its hint that Christianity has often presented itself in a corrupt and misunderstood forms.  (Illich’s corruptio optimi pessima is an important supplement to Rosenstock’s courageous but incorrigible tendency to “accentuate the positive” – a point I’ll take up in a minute.)  Rosenstock divides Christian history into three epochs, and, with his gift for bold typologies, defines them as follows: in the first millennium one God replaces many gods; in the second millennium, a single world is created – at first through the medium of “the Papacy as a world power,” and subsequently through “the system of territorial states” that grew up in the image of the Papal state.  Now “we are living through the agonies of transition to the third epoch” whose task will be to realize the unity of mankind – “the great singular of humanity, in one household,” he says.[162]

At the time it was written, this scheme would not have shocked, as it does now.  (The Christian Future was first published in 1946 and republished in a popular paperback series in 1966.[163])  At the time, Rosenstock’s sense of an incipient new age would have borne comparison to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s reflections in his letters from prison on “religionless Christianity” and “man come of age” or to the theme of “planetary consciousness,” that found so many expressions in the 1960’s and after – from McLuhan’s global village to Teilhard de Chardin’s “noosphere” to the Lindisfarne Association’s vision of a “new planetary culture.”[164]  Today, with reaction to “globalization” in full spate, and the angelic noosphere abuzz with the static of the internet, Rosenstock’s prophecy makes a very different impression.  His word “agonies” predicts our present moment well enough, but, even so, it’s hard, in the present atmosphere, to remember or recapture the visionary imagination of a new age which Rosenstock helped to generate.  Rosenstock was an optimist, though the word  seems pallid and I should perhaps better say a man of faith, but he was not naïve, and he did not forget what he had seen at Verdun.  He recognized, as we have seen, the repaganization of the West; he admitted that Christianity was “bankrupt” at the time he wrote; and his whole attempt to reformulate Christianity as a social vision, hinging on embodiment and timely action, rather a private relationship to a fantasized God,     implied clearly enough that he knew his vision of a new age was a long way even from being understood, let alone fulfilled.  Rosenstock died in 1973, at a time when the visionary gleam still lingered – Illich, in those same years, also wrote intoxicated lines about “the invention of the future” and “man’s race to maturity” and, more than once, gave evidence that he thought the deschooling of society was imminent[165] – but Rosenstock was also in many ways a realist and knew that the third epoch would take just as long as the previous two millennia to unfold and that, when it did, it would happen in the same vexed and tortuous way that things had happened in the past. 

In The Creation of Adam, Michaelangelo’s often-reproduced fresco on the roof of the Sistine Chapel, God is shown with a cloud of angels enfolded in his robe, while Adam lies alone and naked on the rugged ground of the new creation.  All powers and potentialities are on the side of God, whom Adam reaches to touch.  But imagine, Rosenstock says, a pendant to this picture painted, so to speak, at the other end of time.  In this supplement, “all the spirits that had accompanied the Creator would have left him and descended to man.”[166]  Rosenstock’s fancy gives a pretty fair image of his estimation of our present moment, as well as a good sense of how he thought the Incarnation had acted in history.  We have taken the place of God, and, by the largely automatic and unconscious operations of credit and techno-science, made many worlds into one, but have not yet learned how to live in this haunted and uncanny space.  This is the challenge of the third Christian epoch, though it’s Christian elements will often appear, in Rosenstock’s nicely chosen word, “incognito.”

Like Illich, who also argues, though in a somewhat different vein, that Christianity has disappeared into the very structure of our present world, Rosenstock sees the  Incarnation as the motive power of Western-becoming-world history.  In his “autobiography of Western man,” Out of Revolution, as we have seen, he speaks of the revolutionary upheavals that have marked Western history as “the march of the Holy Spirit through the nations.”[167]  This effect, as said earlier, is explicit in the Papal revolution, the Reformation, and the English revolution, but implicit, and often carefully disguised, thereafter.  I have, for example, already related his intriguing theory that the invention of Renaissance during the early 19th Century was a ploy to hide the influence of the Reformation on the French Revolution.  By our time this disguise is so complete and mystifying that what Illich calls our “obviously Christian epoch” is not only aggressively convinced that it is post-Christian, it is actively scandalized by the memory of its ever having been Christian.[168]  In Canada, for example, a spate of church burnings that would have brought the house down had the targets been mosques or synagogues, gurdwaras or sacred mountains, has passed without much comment in our political mainstream.  It was “unacceptable,” our prime minister said at one point but also “understandable.”[169]

This occulting, as you might say, of Christianity and its influence is what Rosenstock calls “Christianity incognito.”  Many scholars have tried to make this influence patent since Carl Schmitt asserted in his Political Theology that all our significant political concepts are “secularized theological concepts,” and not just by their descent but in their “systematic structure.”[170]  In recent years, thinkers like Charles Taylor and John Milbank have shown convincingly that secularity is a product of Christianity not a departure from it,  and Ivan Illich has made a persuasive case that “modernity can be studied as an extension of church history.”[171]  But a powerful consensus - our default setting, as I said earlier – continues to hold that we are an enlightened, secular and scientific people for whom Christianity is at most a privately preferred “spirituality.” 

So many of us are both Christian and non-Christian at once: Christian by our institutions and habits of thought; non-Christian by our disavowal of the Christian religion.  “Christian and pagan, believer and unbeliever,” Rosenstock writes, “[are] no longer separate from each other as at first, but side by side within every soul,” and it is against this background that “a further…evolution of Christianity” must be plotted.[172]

French thinker Marcel Gauchet calls Christianity the religion of “the exit from religion,” or “the end of religion.”[173]  Like Charles Taylor, he notes that Christianity, by disenchanting the world and humanizing God, produces secularity, and this means, for Gauchet, that Christianity tends to stage its own disappearance.  The point is tricky because secular society is not just Christianity’s consequence, it is also its realization, however deviant.  In that sense, Illich’s “most obviously Christian epoch” is not a time that has exited from religion so much as one that has become unconscious of its religion.  Christianity has been at the same time consummated and corrupted, achieved and repudiated, and this has created an inherently mystifying situation in which we are what we aren’t and aren’t what we are.  As Illich’s formula, corruptio optimi pessima, makes plain, our troubles are precisely tailored to the good that might have been ours.  But the worst to which we are falling – our being increasingly “out of whack with any prior historical epoch,” as Illich says[174] – remains unintelligible until we take account of the distorting mirror it holds up to the best.  What most needs to be seen is out of sight, out of mind, and, often enough, under active taboo. 

Rosenstock certainly doesn’t see things exactly as Illich does, but they are arguably looking at the same glass with one, Illich, seeing it half empty, and the other, Rosenstock seeing it half-full.  The same illusion of difference can be generated by comparing Illich to Rene Girard and concluding that Girard sees the good Christianity did in exposing the machinery of violence, scapegoating and mimetic desire, while Illich sees only the harm.  Different points of emphasis and accentuation are mistaken for disagreement.  What I reluctantly called Rosenstock’s optimism a moment ago is germane in this context.  Unfortunate, or perhaps just unself-conscious phrases, like “the march of the Holy Spirit through the nations,” can be read as triumphalist when they only actually indicate what Illich believes just as much as Rosenstock – that through the Incarnation the Holy Spirit has been made available to the nations and has had its effect on them.  There is certainly more of realpolitik, if not of theodicy and “the cunning of history,” in Rosenstock’s history of revolution, and his argument that each revolution enacts what is “necessary” at the moment it occurs, than there is in Illich’s view of modernity as the consummation of the mysterium iniquitatis.[175]  But even so, Rosenstock believed that he was facing, in his time, a “bankrupt” Christianity – a religion that, by definition, had exhausted its resources and currently lacked both the names and the  images it would need to inaugurate a new age.  “All sacred names have a limited span of life,” Rosenstock says, without exception.[176]  Death comes before resurrection.

In these circumstances, Rosenstock predicted that Christianity would assume new forms.  “The inspiration of the Holy Spirit,” he says, “will not remain inside the walls of the visible or preaching Church.  A third form, the listening Church, will have to unburden the older modes of worship by assembling the faithful to live out their hopes through living and working together in unlabelled, undenominational groups.”  “Christianity… may rise from the dead,” he concludes “but only “if it now discards its self-centredness.”[177]  These are both adventurous predictions.  An institution without a name – “unlabelled” – and with no particular regard for itself – no “self-centredess” – is not easy to imagine for those with any experience of actually existing institutions.  But Rosenstock’s thought here is very close in its inspiration to Bonhoeffer’s equally illusive idea of a “religionless Christianity.”  Neither Bonhoeffer nor Rosenstock pretended to know what this would actually look like in practice. Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac, who held, like Rosenstock, that “the stages of history . . . are in reality stages of an essentially collective salvation,” took the view that the whole world must finally be seen as a church and that only in this perspective does the Christian doctrine of salvation make any contemporary sense.[178]  Certainly Rosenstock’s insistence that salvation is social, collective and communal – that God does not, as he says, deal with us “privately” – points in this direction.  “The listening church” is unlikely to resemble anything we would currently recognize as a church.

But, before such a church can come into existence, there will first have to be something about which Rosenstock has a good deal to say: the new way of thinking that Rosenstock and Rosenzweig sometimes called “speech thinking.”  The keynote of this kind of thinking is responsiveness.   The age of faith, Rosenstock writes, can be typified by Anselm of Canterbury’s precept: Credo ut intelligam – I believe in order to understand.  The modern age adopted Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum – I think therefore I am.   The new age, he urges, must take as its motto: Respondeo etsi mutabor – I answer even though I will have to change.[179]   This adage captures the essence of speech thinking.  It overturns modernity’s “arch heresy” – “the illusion that we can think outside of the realm of speech” – and puts in its place the principle that “truth is that of our thought which is still valid when it is communicated to others.”[180] 

At the end of his The Great Transformation (1944), Karl Polanyi announced what he called “the discovery of society.”  He meant, roughly, that modernity’s great experiment in trying to reimagine and reconstruct societies as economies had led at last, after two catastrophic world wars, to the discovery that society is irreducible and that people will never finally consent to see themselves and their lands as no more than factors of production.  His contemporary Rosenstock – they were born within two years of one another – made a comparable finding – the discovery of language.  And he gave a comparable explanation of why the originality and irreducibility of language was now coming to light – the Cartesian and Baconian attempt to make thinking primary and to treat language as no more than an instrumental means to “represent the truth after it is perceived” had shown its deficiencies in the same way as the economic project of rendering the living world into a set of “fictitious” commodities.   The two discoveries are related, and Rosenstock, in many ways, complements and completes Polanyi, though they never had anything to do with one another when they lived, so far as I know.  The redefinition of the world as an economy depended on the transformation of the very lineaments of existence into instrumentalities – resources disposable according to their price.  Language was assigned the same instrumental character in Francis Bacon’s plan for a new science.  Language, Bacon said, was a dangerous and deceitful medium that perverted reason and distracted people from the true nature of things, making them mistake their fancies for reality.  It must, accordingly, be retrained as the obedient servant of a rigorous method and deployed only with that “mathematical plainness” urged by the Royal Society’s charter.  We live now in the ruins of Bacon’s utopia – our language tamed to perfect docility, each word instrumentalized by some commercial, professional or ideological purpose, “a ragged and limping vernacular,” as Illich once called it, left at the mercy of Big Language, which raids it from time to time for a jolt of authenticity. 

A new account of language is at the heart of Rosenstock’s project.  Since the age of  Condorcet (1743-1794) and Hamann (1733-1788), the origin of language has been in dispute, with Condorcet and his posterity proposing a mechanistic account in which the long ladder from the first grunt to Finnegan’s Wake is climbed one rung at a time, and Hamman and his successors sensing the impossibility of reasoning about an ability that is itself “the  mother of reason and revelation, its Alpha and Omega.”[181] This second group have tended to notice language’s holistic and recursive character and to conclude that where every step already implies every other step, no step-by-step story can plausibly be constructed.   Not all in this second group have concluded, therefore, that a god, or the God, must have instructed our ancestors, but all have shared some form of the intuition that language must be divine, in at least the minimal sense that we are its creatures and have no place to stand outside of its affordances.  Carl Jung remarked, more than once, that the only replacement for a religion is another religion, and the case is the same with language – beyond language, while we live, there is only more, though perhaps better, language.[182]

Rosenstock and Rosenzweig drew the firm conclusion that there is no world outside of language because it is only by language that we make a world in the first place.  What we call things is what, for the time being, they are; when they stop answering to the names we have given, our only recourse is new names.  The times and places in which we “live, move and have our being,” are effects of the names by which we delineate and describe them. A child is called into existence by its name, and knows itself as a thou – as an addressee – long before it knows itself as an I.  And this is true of our social participation as well: “I am a thou for society long before I am an I to myself,” Rosenstock says.[183]  Language is world-making long before it is discursive and indicative: praising and praying, commanding and declaring come first.

This constructive power is the divine power in us, according to Rosenstock.  We speak only after we have been spoken to; we know only what we have heard.  God is the one who speaks; we speak in his voice and in his name.  But language in our mouths is partial and fallible – words fail us, as we, their careless curators, fail them.  “That is not what I meant, at all,” says Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock. “That is not it, at all.”[184]  Language also limits us.  So long as one believed that behind represented reality there stands a pristine real reality, secure and serene, to which science and philosophy grant different forms of access, then everyone could potentially be made to bow to this truth, and unity achieved.  This was the old dream of science as Pentecost that illuminated the early modern centuries – Descartes’ mathesis universalis, say, or the hope of Renaissance grammarians that their studies would reveal the unity of language behind the Babel of tongues.[185]  Rosenstock participates in the discovery of language as a medium – the ur-medium certainly, but a medium just the same.  All media are in some measure opaque, all offer resistance, and all influence, and sometimes distort, what they transmit.   This was the discovery of Harold Innis and Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman in their elaboration of what Postman called “media ecology.”  But it is a discovery that I think was made across the board in the 20th century.  A notable example is the history and philosophy of science in the years after Thomas Kuhn first proposed, in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that knowledge is inevitably conditioned by the paradigms within which it is organized and oriented.  Einstein’s pretension to know “God’s thoughts” gives a pretty fair idea of what was being overcome in Kuhn’s account.  Writing in 1982, philosopher Isabelle Stengers and chemist Ilya Prigogine would say that, “Science is still the prophetic announcement of a description of the world seen from a divine…point of view.”[186]   Stengers and Prigogine, along with Kuhn and his many successors, were arguing for a new science attentive to “the multiple, the temporal, and the complex.”[187]  Language would not be trained into “mathematical plainness”; point-of-view could not be subtracted from science;  Descartes’ “certitude equal to…the demonstrations of Arithmetic and Geometry” was, in the end, an adolescent fantasy.   The consequences of this new view are summed up in Rosenstock’s respondeo.   Faith can orient us, and trust lead us to commitment, but absolute knowledge is not and will not be ours. 

Speech thinking is social in a double sense.  It is social, first, because speech is a shared and inherited possession in which I can only finally say what others can understand and what others have previously taught me to say.  Comprehension, according to Rosenstock, is the ultimate criterion of validity: “truth is that [part] of our thought which is still valid when it is communicated to others.”[188]  Mind is socially distributed, not isolated in individual brain pans – only “mental monadists,” Rosenstock says, “…look for the mind within the individual.”[189]  But speech thinking is also social in the sense that it endlessly requires supplementation, contradiction or completion by the one whom I address and who addresses me – the one who allows me “to turn his words around in my mouth,” as Illich says.[190]  It is my interlocutor, Rosenzweig says, who will show me what I think and what I can no longer, like the Cartesian ‘thinking thinker” discover all by myself.  This response may draw me out, or oppose me, but in either case I will have to wait for it, and, for this, I must “take time seriously.”   Since the scientific revolution, so called, Rosenstock says, time is “not reasoned about – it is reasoned away.”  For Spinoza it's merely a “mistaken impression,” Einstein calls it a “stubbornly persistent illusion.”[191]  In speech thinking, it returns as a feature of reality, rather than as a cognitive artefact which distracts us from the really real i.e. extension in space. 

The understanding of truth as temporal and social, and of language as its horizon,  potentially undercuts a great deal of contemporary anxiety and offers a ground on which culture war might begin to turn into civil interchange.  From the time of “the science wars” in the 1990’s, when scientific “realists” challenged “social constructionists,” to the current panic over “misinformation” and the supposed prevalence of “anti-science,” there has been an assumption that social stability and social amity depend on restoring the lustre of a truth untouched by human hands, a truth that is objective and purely “discovered.”  This is a reactionary project – it wants to get back to an idealized past of “trusted news” and unquestionable science - even if it is rooted, as I think it is, in a very real and well-founded fear of epistemological chaos.  When “a society finds itself in crisis,” the Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz once wrote, “it instinctively turns its eyes towards its origin and looks there for a sign.”[192]  This describes pretty precisely what seems to me to be going on today – whether one is trying to return to the neverneverland of American greatness, or to the security of certain knowledge and scientific “law.”  “Speech thinking” offers a way ahead – into a world in which truth beckons from an open future instead of lying squandered in a mythical past.  If we depend on one another to find out what is the case, if our language, however corrupted, is still inexhaustibly renewable, and if religion is expressed, not privately, but in our common commitments, then a perspective opens in which there is something more to do than browbeating each other with dead gods.  Gods die, “sacred names” languish, but the living God acquires new names, which have to be discovered by painful experience.  The chaos that the reactionary votaries of truth fear is real, but understanding as the task of Rosenstock’s “listening church” remains an inspiration and a summons.

Rosenstock’s respondeo etsi mutabor is radical.  It throws us into what he calls “the open” – a region in which we await a vision or a commanding word.  It emphasizes attention and attunement to what has yet to be disclosed, rather than trying to reanimate old loyalties.  It opens a path out of the solipsism of the “thinking thinkers,” which most of us continue to be – by default, long habit, and the reinforcing power of our technological environment.  By a responsiveness in which, as Gadamer says, “our own prejudice is…brought into play by being put at risk,” we discover the future as an unknown that summons us, a way out of the welter of warring truths and the long shadow of ideology.  To really be changed by one’s response to another, just as to really be surprised by something, implies that there is something that one hasn’t known, hasn’t expected, and perhaps can’t know or expect by oneself. In silence and waiting, there are grounds for humility and hope.

In The Rivers North of the Future, Illich makes the staggering claim that “the world,” in the New Testament sense, which confronts us today is a “mystery of evil” – a topsy turvy Gospel that would not be what it is if the Gospel had not been preached in the first place.  This mis-taking of the Gospel is no simple mistake – it is, according to Illich, a lengthy process of historical instantiation and ramification, in which our institutions, our technologies, and our ways of thinking and speaking, sensing and feeling all come to embody the original misunderstanding.  William Blake in his poem Jerusalem says: “I give you the end of a golden string./ Only wind it into a ball./ It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate,/Built in Jerusalem’s wall.”[193]  Blake’s import is somewhat different than mine here – he is urging Christians to understand that “Imagination [is] the real and eternal world” – but his image of a thread to be rewound has stayed with me as a hint at how to begin to remedy the condition of gospel-gone-wrong that Illich diagnoses.  Somehow, we have to retrace our steps, back to John Milbank’s “unknown future that [we have] missed,” and undo the misunderstanding. 

Will we then be free to elaborate a new Christianity?  I doubt it.  If Christianity names a religion, and an ideology – an ism as the French Le Christianisme suggests – then a “religionless Christianity,” as Bonhoeffer names this unknown future state, will probably not be called Christianity.  Rosenstock says as much in imagining his “listening church” as comprised of “unlabelled groups.”  Jesus, in his apophatic mode, also recommends anonymity – “Tell no one,” “do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,” “pray…in secret” etc.  Jacques Ellul gets out of the difficulty of calling the gospel by the name of what he considers its subversion – Le Christianisme – by designating the faith he wants to affirm with an algebraic “x.”[194]  One hears of “cultural Christians” and “intellectual Christians” who want to conserve some parts of historical Christianity and not others.   Religion is plainly something we can’t live with and can’t live without, and the problem of naming the nameless, or, to put it another way, of creating an institution that is acquainted with its shadow, is likely to be with us for a long time.  Contradiction may be “the criterion of the real” for Simone Weil, and paradox an emblem of faith for Henri de Lubac, but the cross, in Rosenstock’s sense, is still a long way from being accepted as the sign of truth for most people.[195]

I will not speculate further here, but, as this next Christianity emerges, I think that Rosenstock will have a lot to contribute to it.  As a thinker, he is perfectly, and even, as I’ve said, evangelically Christian, but also perfectly secular in the sense that he stakes no religious or metaphysical claim whatever.  He knows that “faith cannot live unless it remains intermittent”[196]; that “private religion is no religion”[197]; that “bod[ies] of time exist only because we say so”[198]; that “the other world is in this world”[199]; that “all knowledge [bears] the mark of contradiction”[200]and that “timeliness is everything”[201] – to make just a small bouquet of characteristic statements.  None of these statements is “religious” in the accepted sense.  One might call them  “existential,” had this word not been quite so badly enervated by the array of “existential threats” that now crowd every newscast.  Certainly, these statements all refer to properties of existence.  And this is true of Rosenstock’s Christianity in general.  He views the rudiments of Christianity – incarnation and resurrection - as illuminations of the human condition, and not as images of any occult or extra-mundane reality.  God and humanity, for him, are indivisible; and language ultimate, in the sense that it is our matrix, our medium and our limit.  Neither premise is widely accepted, but both have the power to open the future.

[1] David Cayley, The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich, House of Anansi, 2005, 169 (RNF)

[2] RNF, 146

[3] RNF, 68

[4] RNF 68, 61

[5] RNF 48, 170

[6] David Cayley, Ivan Illich in Conversation, House of Anansi, 1992, 279

[7] RNF, 75

[8] The series was broadcast on CBC Radio’s Ideas in early 2000 and is available on my website: https://www.davidcayley.com/podcasts/category/Ivan+Illich

[9] I devoted a long chapter to the subject of Illich’s affinities with contemporary thinkers in the book that was eventually published as Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey (Penn State 2021) but had to cut it in order to reduce the book’s length.  That essay is here: https://www.davidcayley.com/blog/category/Illich%2FAffinities

[10] DS, p.106

[11] David Cayley, George Grant in Conversation, House of Anansi Press, 1995, 74 (GGIC)

[12] GGIC, p. 75

[13] John Milbank, “The Last of the Last: Theology, Authority and Democracy,” Telos 123 (Spring 2002), p. 15

[14] Because Rosenstock left Germany for the United States after Hitler’s accession in 1933, his publication history is quite complicated.  Like Hannah Arendt, Paul Tillich and other permanent emigrés, he soon became a remarkably eloquent English stylist, and, by 1938, with the help of American friends, he had recast and reimagined his nearly 800 page magnum opus, Die Europäischen Revolutionen—Volkscharaktere und Staatenbildung (The European Revolutions and the Character of Nations, 1931) in English as Out of Revolution:  The Autobiography of Western Man.   But his English and German texts are not identical, and there are still works in German that have not appeared in English – an autobiography (Ja und Nein: Autobiograph, L. Schneider, 1968) for example.  One good place to begin an exploration of Rosentstock’s life and work is the website of the Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Fund: https://www.erhfund.org/

[15] Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, I Am An Impure Thinker, Argo Books, 1970, vii-viii (IIT).  Auden paid poetic tribute to Rosenstock’s ideas in a poem written in the year after Rosenstock died and published in the year before Auden died.  Auden presented the poem, wonderfully, not as an elegy but as an aubade – a hymn to dawn. (W.H. Auden, Collected Poems, Vintage, 1976, p. 881 

[16] The lectures were given at Dartmouth College where Rosenstock taught between 1935 and 1957 and can be listened to at the website of the Rosenstock-Huessy fund, mentioned in the previous note.  The quotation is from Cristaudo’s entry on Rosenstock in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.   Cristaudo is professor of political philosophy at Charles Darwin University in Australia’s Northern Territory.  He’s the author of  Religion, Redemption, and Revolution: The New Speech Thinking of Franz Rosenzweig (University of Toronto Press, 2012), and the editor, with Francis Huessy, of The Cross and the Star: The Post-Nietzschean Christian and Jewish Thought of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009)

[17] Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man, William Morrow and Company, 1938, 758 (OR)

[18] https://www.erhfund.org/biography/       

[19]  RNF, 148

[20] Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, Argo Books, 1970, 177 (SR); Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, In the Cross of Reality, Vol. 1, The Hegemony of Spaces, ed. Wayne Cristaudo and Francis Huessy, trans. Jürgen Lawrenz, Transaction Publishers, 2017, 91 (ICR) 

[21] SR, 115, 118

[22]  OR, 720

[23] Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future, or The Modern Mind Outrun, Barakaldo Books, 2020, 40 (CF); Luke 10:41-42 – Jesus says that Mary is doing the “one thing necessary” in listening to him.

[24] https://dartreview.com/dartmouths-philosopher-remembered/

[25] From an unpublished lecture in 1941 quoted in Cristaudo’s article on Rosenstock in The Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy.

[26] All these quotations are from a letter to an unnamed friend in 1946, which was reprinted as “Metanoia: To Think Anew” in “, pp. 184-185.

[27] Ibid, 188

[28] Ibid, 189

[29] https://www.erhfund.org/biography/

[30]  William James, The Moral Equivalent of War,” in The Best American Essays of the Century, ed. Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan, Houghton Miflinm, 2000, p. 52

[31] Ibid, 54

[32] Life Lines: Quotations from the Works of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, ed. Clinton C. Gardner, Argo, 1988 (LL)

[33] OOR 708

[34] Ibid, 5

[35] Matthew 4:17 – “From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’”  Revelation 21:5 – “Behold, I am making all things new.”

[36] OOR, 229 – I have substituted spirit for the word ghost in Rosenstock’s original.  This word must have recommended itself by its common origin with the German Geist, but it has since grown strange, unfamiliar, and nearly archaic.

[37] Ibid 472

[38] Ibid 473

[39] Ibid, 470

[40] Ibid 720

[41] Ibid 719

[42] Myths, Rites and Symbols: A Mircea Eliade Reader (MRS) ed. Wendell C. Beane and William G. Doty, Harper and Row, 1975, 75

[43] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, Basil Blackwell, 1970, 56

[44] ICR, 160

[45] Ibid, 160

[46] Judaism Despite Christianity: The Letters on Judaism and Christianity Between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig (JDC), ed Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, University of Alabama Press, 1969, 180

[47] Ibid, 182

[48] ICR, 180

[49]  Corinthians 15:28

[50] JDR, p. 48

[51] Ibid, 160

[52] Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption (SR), trans. William W. Hallo, Notre Dame, 1985, 340

[53] Ibid, 342

[54] JDC, 33

[55] Franz Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, trans. and ed. Frank W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan, Cambridge/Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2000, pp. 126-127

[56] SR, 109-110; subsequent quotes from this same passage

[57] “Letter on Humanism,” in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, HarperCollins, p. 193; Han George Gadamer, Truth and Method (TM), Continuum Books, 1975p. 440

[58] Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, Book II, p. 211, reproduced here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:The_Works_of_Francis_Bacon_(1884)_Volume_1.djvu/339

[59] Thomas Spratt, The History of the Royal Society, S. Chapman, 1722, p. 113

[60] “I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts; the rest [is] just details.” (E. Salaman, “A Talk with Einstein,” Listener 54 (1955), 370-371)

[61] Franz Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings, translated and edited by Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan, Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing. 2000, p. 126

[62] RNF, p. 159

[63] “The All as one-and-universal can be held together only by…reasoning…  But if vitality is thereby ascribed to reasoning, it must willy-nilly be denied to life.” (The Star of Redemption, p. 47),  “By asserting that ‘All is One’ philosophy was also asserting that ‘All is nothing.’” (Philosophical and Theological Writings,  p. 33)

[64] ICR. 123

[65] SR, 98

[66] Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Origin of Speech (OS), Argo Books, 1981, 16

[67] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_mood

[68] CF, 157

[69] Ronald Gregor Smith, J.G. Hamann, 1730-1788: A Study in Christian Existence (JGH), Collins, 1960, 85, 162

[70] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Future Philosophy, Cambridge, 2002, 20

[71] Quoted in Jacques Gernet, China and the Christian Impact (Cambridge, 1985), p. 240.  Gernet cites “Catégories de pensée et categories de langue,” Études philosophiques, IVd (Oct-Dec. 1958, reprinted in Problèmes de linguistique générale (Gallimard, ’66, pp. 63-74)

[72] OS, 103

[73] JDC, 119

[74] JGH, 225

[75] Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Rule Four, in The Philosophical Writings of René Descartes, Vol. 1, Cambridge, 1984. 19

[76] Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Open Court, 1994, 140

[77] See Bergson’s Creative Evolution and Innis’s Changing Concepts of Time

[78] OS, 37

[79] CF, 8

Saint Augustine Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick, Oxford World’s Classics, 1991, 230

[81] “Milton, Book the First,” in The Complete Poetry and Prose of Wiliam Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, Anchor Books, 1988, 121

[82] SR, 177

[83] IIT, 77

[84] Friedrich Nietzsche, “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable,” Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kauffman,  Penguin, 1976, 485-486

[85] Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Vol. One: Thinking, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971, 10

[86] “The fourfold,” in Heidegger’s thought is the “gathering” of earth and sky, mortals and gods, in which things become real.  The idea is developed in the essay “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” in the collection Language, Poetry, Thought (Harper Colophon, 1971)

[87] CF 211

[88] SR, 177

[89] SR, 21

[90] OOR, 699

[91] OOR 702

[92] SR, 174

[93] Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, Hackett, 1983

[94] Cross, 262

[95] SR, 16

[96] Luke 4:32

[97] John 18:36; Romans 12:2

[98] John 12:24

[99] CF, 9

[100] CF, 31

[101] MSR, 75

[102] Matthew Rose, “Killing Time,” First Things, March 4, ‘25

[103] Simone Weil, Waiting for God, Harper and Row, 1973, 69

[104] Simon Weil, Letter to a Priest, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953, 17

[105] Simon Weil, First and Last Notebooks, Oxford, 1970, 302

[106] Letter to a Priest, 127

[107]RNF, 176

[108] ICR, 180

[109] CF, 117

[110] RNF, 49

[111] Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Fruit of our Lips, The Pickwick Press, 1978, 121 (FOL)

[112] CF 212

[113] SR, 161

[114] Harold M. Stahmer, "Speech-Letters" and "Speech-Thinking": Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock Huessy, Modern Judaism , Feb., 1984, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Feb., 1984), p 75; this is Stahmer’s translation from a German source, unpublished in English

[115] CF 114

[116] OS, 95          

[117] OS, xv

[118] “A Plea for Time” was a lecture Innis delivered at the University of New Brunswick in 1950 and then incorporated into his The Bias of Communication (Toronto, 1951, pp. 61-91

[119] Exodus 3:14

[120] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_that_I_Am

[121] Matthew 4:19

[122] FOL, 53

[123] ICR, 11

[124] See note 20

[125] On doubling ourselves – ICR, 171; Of two minds – ICR, 11

[126] The Cross of Reality: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Lectures Vol. 5, Lecture 24, Dartmouth College Philosophy, 1953, 503

[127] Arendt presents the idea in The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958) and many other place in her work.

[128] CF, 279

[129] OOR, 90

[130] CF, 285

[131] Wayne Cristaudo quotes this unpublished speech in his excellent article on Rosenstock in the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy; he cites Microfilm 358, Reel 7 in The Collected Works held at Dartmouth.

[132] Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 562

[133] JGH, p. 225, 235, 247

[134] LL, 47; Gardner quotes this saying from Auden’s Viking Book of Aphorism, where no source is given

[135] LL, 36; Gardner cites one of Rosenstock’s Dartmouth lectures

[136] Ibid, 34; from the Dartmouth archive, as above

[137] CF, 251

[138] Ibid, 125

[139] Ibid, 125, 126

[140] Ibid, 132

[141] CF, 114

[142] LL, 28, translated from Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts

[143] Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Harvard, 1993, p. 32ff.

[144] CF 117

[145] JGH, 137

[146] See note 60

[147] SR, 14

[148] LL, 65-66; from the Dartmouth archive

[149] Ibid, 44; from the Dartmouth archive

[150] CF, 109

[151] G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, Hendrickson, 2007, 238

[152] CF, 75, 109

[153] CF, 101

[154] CF, 162

[155] Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, Stanford, 2011; Nicholas Heron, Liturgical Power: Between Economic and Political Theology, Modern Language Initiative, 2017

[156] CF, 137, 138

[157] CF, 139

[158] Ivan Illich, Gender, Pantheon, 1982, 159ff.

[159] RNF, 196

[160] Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, Ignatius Press, 1958, 153

[161] CF, 137, 138

[162] CF, 139

[163] The book was originally published by Charles Scribner’s Sons and reissued in paperback in the Harper Torchbooks series.

[164] Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison first appeared in English in 1953; McLuhan began writing of “the global village” in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962); Teilhard’s concept of the noosphere is developed in his posthumous The Phenomenon of Man (French, 1955; English 1959); The Lindisfarne Association was founded by cultural historian William Irwin Thompson in 1972, following up on ideas he had expressed the year before in his book At the Edge of History.

[165] See Celebration of Awareness (Doubleday, 1970), p. 5, and Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey (Penn State, 2021), p. 114

[166] OOR, 7327

[167] See note 36

[168] See note 5

[169] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Canadian_church_burnings

[170] Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, MIT, 1985/1922, 36

[171] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Harvard, 2007; John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, Wiley Blackwell, 2006/1990; RNF– see note 1

[172] CF, 152

[173] Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World, Princeton, 1999

[174] RNF, 60

[175] OOR, 719; “the cunning of history” is G.W.F. Hegel’s term in his Philosophy of History for the ways in which historical events, often terrible, produce results the historical actors never intended or foresaw

[176] CF, 8

[177] CF, 156

[178] Catholicism, 148; Benjamin M. Durheim, “All the World is Church: The Christian Call in Henri de Lubac,” Obsculta, Volume 2, Issue 1, 5/1/2009

[179] OOR, 751

[180] SR, 172, 72

[181] See note 69

[182] I have come across the observation repeatedly in Jung’s writings.  As far as I know, it is first found in a letter to Freud – C.G. Jung, Letters, Vol. 1, Princeton, 1973, p. 18

[183] OS, 90

[184] T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" from Collected Poems 1909-1962, Faber and Faber, Ltd, 1963, 16

[185] For Descartes reference, see note 75; the idea that Renaissance grammarians thought of their science as a Pentecost that would overcome Babel by a scientific anatomy of language in general, I owe to early modern scholar, Roland Greene, who explains it in the first section of Part Three of the CBC radio series, The Origins of the Modern Public:  https://www.davidcayley.com/podcasts/category/Origins+of+Modern+Public

[186] Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature, New Science Library, Shambhala Books, Boulder, p. 76.  (This book was published by Gallimard in French in 1982, under the title La Nouvelle Alliance: Metamorphose de la Science.)

[187] Ibid, p. xxvii

[188] See note 180

[189] CF, 275

[190] RNF, 159

[191] SR 28; Rosenstock quotes Spinoza; the Einstein example is mine – from memory, but, as I recall, it comes from his correspondence with Michele Besso, where he expresses his conviction as that of a “believing physicist.”

[192] Octavio Paz, “Reflections: Mexico and the United States, The New Yorker, Sept. 17, 1979, p. 153

[193] Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, 231

[194] Jacques Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity, Wipf and Stock, 2011, p. 11ff.

[195] Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952. 89; Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith, Ignatius Press, 1987

[196] CF, 110

[197] CF 251

[198] CF, 203

[199] CF, 152

[200] See note 122

[201] See note 40