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2 Reconciling Science and Religion
The mind with its imperious urge to relate and unify everything is tempted to over-simplify life and deny the Cross of Reality by reducing the four (fronts) to one. This is the main source of viciously one-sided fallacies about man and society—sentimentalism and mysticism which engulf everything in the inner life of feeling, utopian radicalism which would bring in the Kingdom of God by violence, reactionary romanticism which dwells wholly in the feudal past, cynical rationalism which reduces man to a mere object of natural science.
—Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
SO THOROUGHLY SMITTEN was I by Eugen in the early 1940s that I have pursued his work quite steadily ever since. Returning to finish my education at Dartmouth after the war, I took all his courses, then stayed in close touch with him throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Among our ties was that Eugen’s only child, Hans, married my sister Mariot. Even in church we were close; Eugen, a deacon in the Norwich Congregational Church, usually sat in the pew just ahead of my wife Libby and me.
I turned my journal into my first book about him in the mid-1960s, and then began publishing his work in the late 1960s. My theme in all my writing about him has been to explain how he trans-lates the religious into the secular, and vice versa. It wasn’t simply that he’d shown his students how we could be good Christians without the slightest belief in the supernatural, or how we could worship God without thinking that he lived beyond the universe. Just as important was the way that Eugen showed us how everything we know is connected.
The American sociologist David Riesman, who was an admirer of Rosenstock-Huessy’s work, once said: “The great religions all think in terms of connectedness. Everything is related to everything else.” Another admirer of Eugen, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, expressed a similar thought: “All sciences and philosophies have one axiom in common—the axiom of unity of all that is, was and will be.” We students of Eugen’s were smitten because he gave us a new way of perceiving that unity, the connectedness of all creation.
An Alternate Consilience
To focus on the theme of reconciling science and religion, we can turn to Edward O. Wilson’s bestseller, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. His first intimation of consilience, he says, was when he experienced in college “the Ionian Enchantment,” the conviction “that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws.” Raised on Christian fundamentalism, he felt liberated by the grand picture of evolution and the empirical science of the Enlightenment.
Today Wilson sees the battle lines drawn between the two world views of “religious transcendentalism” and “scientific empiricism.” The possibility that there could be a third view, religious empiricism, eludes him. Empiricism, of course, refers to knowledge gained through the senses, through experience or experiment, knowledge that can be tested and verified.
Wilson’s grand conclusion is that “all tangible phenomena, from the birth of stars to the workings of social institutions, are based on material processes that are ultimately reducible, however long and tortuous the sequences, to the laws of physics.” He envisions the unification of the natural sciences with the social sciences and humanities. As he puts it, “The human condition is the most im-portant frontier of the natural sciences,” and “the material world exposed by the natural sciences is the most important frontier of the social sciences and humanities. The consilience argument can be distilled as follows: the two frontiers are the same.”
Now the Cross of Reality challenges that picture head on. The laws of physics relate only to the world of matter, the world defined by the space that lies outside us. They do not relate at all to the frontiers established by future and past times, or to the frontier of the “space” within the self. The laws of physics have nothing to say about what Rosenstock-Huessy called the obvious goal of all social science: the creation of peace among individuals, groups, and nations. We live on four frontiers, not on two that can be reduced to one. In other words, we cannot be reduced to a mere object of natural science.
Argo Books
W. H. Auden once told me that he had read everything of Rosenstock-Huessy’s that he could lay his hands on. That was in 1969, when I had become Rosenstock-Huessy’s American publisher, and was hoping Auden would write a foreword for one of our books. Auden came through with a fine recollection of Rosenstock-Huessy’s influence on him. He cited Rosenstock-Huessy’s motto (I respond although I will be changed) and concluded his piece with these words: “Speaking for myself, I can only say that, by listening to Rosenstock-Huessy, I have been changed.”
Argo Books, my publishing venture, was launched with the help of Eugen’s friend Freya von Moltke. Needless to say, Argo Books was a labor of love. The 37 years I’ve devoted to Argo and other Eugen-related activities are more than double the eighteen I spent running my own business, a mail order company called Shopping International.
Sabine Bonhoeffer’s Article
In 1963, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s sister Sabine wrote an article about the similarities between her brother’s thought and Eugen’s. She wrote that “both men believed, hoped, anticipated, and did much in common.” Their words have “come to life in many hearts, but least of all in those of German theologians.”
Rosenstock-Huessy’s connection with Dietrich Bonhoeffer had an important practical link. In 1929, Rosenstock-Huessy collaborated with Helmuth von Moltke, a scion of Germany’s greatest military family, to found a German movement for voluntary service. Several members of that movement later formed the Kreisauer Kreis (Kreisau Circle), one of the few resistance groups against Hitler.
Rosenstock-Huessy has rightly been called the spiritual father of that group, whose common enterprise resulted in work camps that brought university students, young farmers, and miners together for community service and discussions of pressing social concerns. As Sabine Bonhoeffer reported, her brother knew all about the Kreisauer Kreis—and met with Helmuth von Moltke several times. And whereas Bonhoeffer was not a member of the group, he certainly supported its goals. Bonhoeffer was finally arrested by the Gestapo in April 1943 and executed in April 1945; von Moltke was arrested in January 1944 and executed in January 1945. It was Moltke’s widow, Freya, who later became Eugen’s friend and companion at the end of his life.
The historian and political advisor, George Kennan, who had served in the US embassy in Berlin just before the war, later wrote a remarkable testimonial about Helmuth von Moltke: “I consider him. . . to have been the greatest person, morally, and the largest and most enlightened in his concepts, that I met on either side of the battle lines in the Second World War.”
Three Thinkers for the Third Millennium
That bit of history around Helmuth von Moltke, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy undoubtedly had something to do with what the American theologian Harvey Cox learned when he attended a 1961 conference in Berlin. Convened to consider the future of theological thought, the assembled church leaders took a vote at the end of their conclave; they selected Bonhoeffer, Tillich, and Rosenstock-Huessy as the three 20th-century religious thinkers who would still be important in the third millennium.
The Problem with Genius
When I wrote in December 1940 that many of his students and I were “completely smitten” by Rosenstock-Huessy, I might have added that we were more aware that we were hearing something important than we were sure about how we would describe just what that “something” was. We sensed that the Cross of Reality was, indeed, a model of how we experienced life in all its richness, and we also sensed that this model could be turned into a method to address any human problem, be it in the realm of religious or secular life, be it personal, social, or international. Since it did not exclude, but in fact included, the scientific method we use to deal with raw nature, we sensed that the Cross of Reality showed how everything is connected.
Yet, for most of us, there would have to be many years of further reading in Eugen’s work, especially his works on language, before we could say in our own words exactly how the Cross of Reality gave us such a unifying perspective. Eugen spoke as a prophet, with the volcanic eruptions of what were clearly original thoughts. He was not one who tidied up after these eruptions.
I think that helps explain why Rosenstock-Huessy remains undiscovered to this day, as a social philosopher or as a theologian, while his friends Tillich and Karl Barth (1886–1968) became perhaps our best-known theologians. Tillich put his finger on it when he said, “Rosenstock-Huessy—when he speaks, it’s like lightning.” Flashes of genius need to be clarified by their author or the author’s circle. This issue was addressed by the prominent Lutheran scholar Martin Marty in 1967, when he reviewed Rosenstock-Huessy’s most popular book, The Christian Future (first published in 1946). Welcoming a new edition of that work, Marty noted that he had been a long-time admirer of Rosenstock-Huessy’s work. But then he went on to say:
It has never been possible to pigeon-hole Rosenstock-Huessy. . . . His juxtaposition of conventional genius and genial unconventionality is both disconcerting and creative. In 1946 Rosenstock-Huessy was ahead of his time—and he still is today. In this book he writes about secularization, hermeneutics, the gift of language, the meaning of personhood, and Christianity, without old-line appeal to transcendence.
Marty recently returned to the question of Rosenstock-Huessy’s disconcerting originality when, in 2006, he wrote: “I always tell people that nine pages of RH are genius, and the tenth is so idiosyncratic, one knows not where to fit it. But that, too, was part of the genius.”
Even more recently, in fact just as this book was being readied for the printer, Marty took a surprising initiative. He devoted his entire April 22, 2008, column in The Christian Century to Rosenstock-Huessy. Under the title “Grace in the center,” Marty writes, “I was influenced enough by him to write a now forgotten book on his theme Respondeo etsi mutabor, ‘I Respond Although I Will Be Changed.’ The motto would be on my coat-of-arms if I had one.”
Marty goes on to suggest three of Rosenstock-Huessy’s books to his readers: The Multiformity of Man; The Christian Future; and I Am an Impure Thinker, “with its provocative essay ‘Farewell to Descartes.’” He ends his piece by offering some of his favorite Rosenstock-Huessy sayings. One of those is: “As soon as we place grace where it belongs, in the center of life, as its inspiration, life ceases to be arbitrary or accidental or casual or boring.”
Having Marty, a former president of the American Academy of Religion, suddenly decide to call attention to Rosenstock-Huessy once more, on the eve of this book’s publication, makes me feel a touch of that grace at the center, an increasing confidence that this work may be coming at just the right time.
One Rosenstock-Huessy student has explained his relative obscurity as follows:
I think it is just that there are too many ideas on the page, like someone telling ten stories at once. And he is too historical/sociological for philosophers, too Christian for a lot of academics, and too this-worldly for most Christians, and he is too anti-theological for theologians—Loewith says of The Christian Future that it is Goethean, not Christian. But I am attracted to Goethe and Blake, and think that Rosenstock-Huessy’s view of the church as a living organism takes building the New Jerusalem as our allotted task.
Eugen was not unaware that there would be such problems in the acceptance of his work. He constantly said that genuinely new thought took at least three generations to introduce—and always required restatement by a second generation. We who have made up the circle gathered round him, so far largely unsuccessful in making the breakthrough, comfort ourselves with that thought. When I wrote to thank Marty for his column, he wrote back: “Bruce Boston (and others) wrote after the column appeared. May his and your and my tribe increase.” (Bruce Boston wrote the first doctoral thesis on Rosenstock-Huessy’s work.)
Speech Is the Body of the Spirit
Perhaps it was because he told so many stories at once that Rosenstock-Huessy seemed to me like an Einstein of the human sciences. He reoriented his students’ post-Enlightenment minds by showing us quite fresh ways to see how everything is connected—and thus how to end the 300-year conflict between science and religion.
To introduce my justification of that bold claim, I’ll quote the mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), whose thoughts on religion still seem alive today: “Man is to himself the most amazing thing in nature; for he cannot imagine what a body is and still less what a spirit is, and least of all how a body can be united to a spirit.”
Pascal is not simply making a statement here. He really is asking us to answer a difficult question: How can we imagine a body united to a spirit?
I think we can find the answer to Pascal’s question by turning to the Cross of Reality. That cross shows us that the actions of the spirit in us are parallel to, indeed the same as, the actions of language in us. Once we grasp that, we are well on our way to understanding how everything is connected, from the most material to the most spiritual.
The quotations at the front of this book bear repeating now, because they clarify what it means to equate the spirit with speech:
God is the power which makes us speak. He puts words of life on our lips.
Everybody who speaks believes in God because he speaks. No declaration of faith is necessary. No religion.
Speech is nothing natural; it is a miracle.
Speech is the body of the spirit.
When we reflect on the full import of those propositions, we realize that God as spirit, indeed as the Holy Spirit, is already within us, the very source of our humanity. Thus, we do not need to struggle to believe in God; we have only to recognize his constant creative presence in us. Of course, there is a further step: We need to respond to the fact of that presence by living inspired, responsible, and creative lives.
Just how does the spirit, as speech, work its miracles within us and within history? It is speech that creates future time and ties us to the past; it is speech that enables us to have an inner space and deal with the world outside us. And it is grammar itself, that apparently mechanical thing, that creates and organizes these realities for us. In fact, we live in a four-fold reality, created by four basic kinds of speech:
- Imperative (or vocative) speech, calling us to the future.
- Subjective speech, addressing the inner self.
- Narrative speech, telling our history.
- Objective speech, analyzing the world outside us.
First, as we listen to the imperatives or vocatives we hear from others, initially from our parents, then from others who love us, later perhaps from clergy or other people we admire, we hear ourselves being addressed as thou. (This intimate form for “you” sounds archaic in English but is perfectly normal, indeed required, in most European languages; for example, in German, it is the familiar Du, as contrasted with the formal Sie. Whenever I use “thou” in this book, think of it as “you” spoken from the heart.)
When we hear ourselves being addressed personally as thou, such speech comes to us with force; imperatives and vocatives establish our calling to make the future, not only for ourselves and our loved ones, but for all humanity. In The Multiformity of Man, this was our infinity equation: ∞ = 1.
In response to having been so called, we discover our I, our subjective and inward self (our inner space), the singular: 1 = 1.
We then seek to return the gift of having been called by being creative ourselves, by contributing to the narrative of history. As we do so, we must form a we, as in marriage or any other history-making attachment, the dual: 2 = 1.
Finally, in the outside world, we become known objectively in the third person, as he or she. In effect, we become part of they, the plural: 3 = 1.
These four orientations to reality—to future and past in time, to inward and outward in space—form the Cross of Reality in which we live. Those orientations are not simply out there, waiting for us to discover them. Instead, the four basic forms of language create those four different orientations and mold us into those four different grammatical persons. It is speech that creates inward and outward space as well as backward and forward time. (In nature, time has no forward movement.)
Rosenstock-Huessy provided a beautifully concise description of this progress of speech through us when he wrote:
The soul must be called “thou” before she can ever reply “I,” before she can ever speak of “us,” and finally analyze “it.” Through the four figures, thou, I, we, it, the word walks through us. The word must call our name first. We must have listened and obeyed before we can think or command.
Those words bring us back to Pascal’s question: How can we imagine a body united to a spirit? We can answer his question when we recognize that the spirit is not something ethereal; it comes out of our mouths and into our ears. The spirit is speech; it is the word that calls our name.
Of course, Rosenstock-Huessy had the Cross of Reality in mind when he wrote that description of how the word walks through us—in the four figures thou, I, we, and it. Following him, throughout this book I’ll continue to show how the Cross of Reality connects all our experience and knowledge, both religious and secular, both personal and historical. Let me now offer some brief previews of those connections.
Universal History
My favorite course with Eugen was his “Universal History,” in which he described how humankind had been created by four kinds of speech.
During some 40,000 years before Christ, tribal speech, with its totems and taboos, had oriented us to our ancestors, to the narrative of our past.
Then, in the great empires, such as China and Egypt, already flourishing by 3000 BC, the speech of the temple oriented us to the stars, the rivers, and the fields, the universe of nature, the world outside us.
By 600 BC Greek speech had begun to orient us to our inner selves, through poetry and philosophy.
During that same millennium before Christ, the speech of Israel emerged, orienting us to our future by way of prophecy.
With the coming of the Christian era, those four ancient modes of speech were fused, and after Christ, we no longer felt bound by a single orientation. We were no longer simply Greek or Jew, Egyptian or tribesman. For 2,000 years now, we have been moving steadily toward spiritual unity, as we have become increasingly able to articulate all four forms of speech.
Four great types of civilization had reached dead ends at Year Zero of our common era. Christ and his apostles came at the right time. They translated those dead ends into new beginnings, becom-ing in effect the narrow middle in the hourglass of history. Since that center-time, human history has become one story.
Eugen’s friend, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), described the period 800 BC–200 BC as “the Axial Age,” the time when most of the great religions and philosophies were born. Among the founders he cited were Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Lao Tzu, the Buddha, Zoroaster, and Isaiah. Eugen agreed with Jaspers, seeing these pre-Christians as necessary preparers for the narrow middle when Christ
was born.
Western History
Just as he told pre-Christian history in terms of four kinds of speech, so Rosenstock-Huessy saw these four kinds of speech given different emphases in each of the great Western revolutions. The imperatives established in the first millennium of the Christian era made all those revolutions necessary, from what he called the “Papal Revolution” of the High Middle Ages to the Russian Communist revolution of our own time. Each of the six great revolutions had different impulses:
- The Papal Revolution had a messianic orientation toward the future.
- The German Reformation emphasized our inner conscience.
- The British Parliamentary or Puritan Revolution celebrated the laws and traditions of the past.
- The French Revolution focused on the outer front, where reason and objectivity hold sway.
- The American Revolution was a happy combination of impulses from both the French and the British.
- Finally, the Russian Revolution turned into a rather unhappy combination of future messianism with the new language of objectivity. People became statistics.
Jung and Psychology
From 1962 until his death in 1973, Eugen and I visited frequently at Four Wells. We would talk for an hour or so in his sunny study on the second floor. Sometimes I would bring a book like Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Eugen did not dismiss Jung the way he did Freud and Comte. After all, Jung retained great respect for religion.
Still Eugen was not happy with Jung’s three main contributions to psychology: the significance of dreams, the exploration of the unconscious, and the role of archetypes. In Eugen’s view, dreams were the “garbage heap” of the human mind, not revealing anything important about ourselves. Nor is there any hereditary unconscious that influences our actions. We enter the world pretty much as a tabula rasa, a blank slate, and become what has been spoken into us.
Jung’s conviction that there are always four aspects of psychological orientation has more than a hint of the Cross of Reality in it. Jung also had a compelling idea that something resembling religion was needed and present in everyone, whether they liked to call it religion or not. Eugen, however, seemed to be quite on target in his thought that there was only one great archetype: Our brain was shaped, from the beginning, to recognize speech in its four distinctive modes. We did indeed inherit this crucial archetype, engraved in our hearts and minds.
Teilhard and Evolution
Besides Jung, another important thinker I discussed with Eugen was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In The Phenomenon of Man, this great Jesuit paleontologist had described evolution as the progressive “inspiriting” of matter. In fact, I had compared Eugen’s thought with Teilhard’s in one of our church discussion groups. Not surprisingly, I had detected what I thought was a version of the Cross of Reality in Teilhard’s book. His “Omega Point,” toward which evolution is moving, of course relates to the future. His category of the within, which he equates with spirit’s existence in raw matter, he called radial energy. In humans he called it consciousness. The story of evolution, our narrative history, he described as the continual growth of that spiritual energy. It takes form in the outer world, which he called the without. I concluded that Teilhard, like Tillich, helped us move away from thinking of God as a supreme being.
Teilhard’s view that man was evolution’s leading edge seemed to enhance Darwin’s drabber picture, without denying what the great naturalist had discovered.
Similarly, Eugen’s view of evolution did not deny Darwin’s discoveries. But “survival of the fittest” did not mean something like being the fastest at scurrying away from danger—or the strongest at bashing in the heads of one’s opponents. Rather, the “fittest” among us are those who are the most inspired and successful in speaking toward the past and the future, toward the inner self and the world around us.
Teilhard had described today’s earth as a “noosphere” (from the Greek noos, “mind”). I thought it would be better to call it an “orasphere” (from the Latin orare, “to speak.”), a shift Eugen liked. Nor did I share Teilhard’s optimism about the inevitability of progress. One of Teilhard’s propositions was that it would be irrational to imagine “the universe committing abortion upon itself.” However, he wrote that in the 1930s, before we knew of the hydrogen bomb.
Beyond Theology
Rosenstock-Huessy felt that, after our overwhelming experience of the First World War, we should seek quite new directions in our religious and social thinking—and not simply attempt to revive theology, as his friends Tillich and Barth had proceeded to do. Instead, he thought that the old concerns of theology should be taken up by new disciplines, such as the higher sociology he envisioned as metanomics. He once described the purpose of that future discipline as “the search for the omnipresence of God in the most contradictory patterns of human society.”
Rosenstock-Huessy’s most accessible thought on Christianity is in The Christian Future. One line in that book has been running as an undercurrent in my mind as I have been writing this one: “The supernatural should not be thought of as a magical force somehow competing with electricity or gravitation in the world of space, but as the power to transcend the past by stepping into an open future.”
Those words sum up what Rosenstock-Huessy told his students about the supernatural. He said that the laws of nature cannot be interrupted by miracles, faith, or prayer. While there is no super-natural in that sense, he said that all creative human speech is supernatural. As he put it, “speech is the only supernatural.” Since we are the animal that speaks, we are “the uphill animal,” the only one able to rise above its natural environment.
Rosenstock-Huessy’s thinking about God resembled Berdyaev’s, since both of them sought to get beyond our heritage of theism. In fact, Solovyov, Berdyaev’s spiritual father, joins with them, making up a triumvirate. All three contributed to a panentheistic understanding of God, one that is expressed in Berdyaev’s proposal that we think of God as being “like a whole humanity.”
Rosenstock-Huessy’s thinking about God also resembled Berdyaev’s in that both of them could be called “trinitarian thinkers.” As I listened to Rosenstock-Huessy, I realized that imperative speech, calling us to the future, relates to revelation and the Holy Spirit; subjective speech of the inner person relates to redemption and the Son; and narrative speech, carrying the past forward, relates to creation and the Father.
Answering Pascal’s Question
The preceding reflections on the subjects of history, psychology, evolution, and theology—all aimed at showing the connectedness of Rosenstock-Huessy’s thinking—were triggered by Pascal’s ques-tion of how we can think of a body as being united to a spirit. I have answered that the Cross of Reality shows us just how that can be. The cross is an image of how everything is connected. Descartes, natural science, and reason have not been dismissed in this post-Cartesian perspective. They have simply been relegated to the objective front of our four-front experience.
Respondeo etsi Mutabor
In sum, the Cross of Reality offers us a third framework for our thinking, beyond those of natural science and theology. Rosenstock-Huessy sought to capture the character of this third framework in that motto that Auden and Marty cited, Respondeo etsi mutabor. My early notes on this motto, written just after the war, tried to explicate it, as follows.
For several generations now, we have been thoroughly “scientific.” We have pretended to be sitting on a bridge above the stream of reality, watching the waters roll past. Occasionally we moistened a toe in the stream, but still imagined ourselves above it, observing it from outside. Our belief that there was such a position stemmed from Descartes’ 17th-century Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). And doubt everything else.
Only a few generations ago we had a different viewpoint. From the theological perspective we certainly did not think of ourselves as doubting or being above it all. Instead, we saw ourselves as believing and subservient. The ultimate reality was like clouds in the heavens, shining above. That theological perspective was summed up in Saint Anselm’s 11th-century Credo ut intelligam (I believe, in order that I may understand).
But for many of us today, neither the strictly scientific nor the strictly theological viewpoints make sense. We are struggling to find a third perspective on where we stand in the order of reality, a new way of expressing how we are beginning to see things. To help us discover and articulate a new standpoint, Eugen proposes an updated Latin formula to replace the Cogito and the Credo. Like them, it is a motto expressed in just three words: Respondeo etsi mutabor (I respond although I will be changed).
In this new perspective we are neither above nor below reality. We stand at its center. We are addressed by it and we must reply. In the process of replying, by speech and act, we find that we have been changed. We make progress insofar as we make truthful (and that means timely) replies.
In this new perspective, God is not a being dwelling above us, but rather “the power which makes us speak.” And the power that forces us to answer. The Cross of Reality shows us that any significant experience in life starts with an imperative or vocative, calling us toward the future. The motto Respondeo etsi mutabor describes what happens when we hear such a call. At first we are not sure whether we should respond. We are comfortable with the past, with what we already know. To do something new may be painful; in fact, it usually is. That’s why Eugen used the word etsi, although. But there’s never any progress, personal or social, without people taking the risk and responding to some new calling in their lives.
Can These Ideas Be Tested?
The professional attackers of religion like to make much of the “fact” that no religious propositions can be tested. In Sam Harris’s 2004 blockbuster book, The End of Faith, he says you cannot prove that any religious propositions are true; there’s no evidence for them. If you frame such propositions in traditional language, perhaps Harris has a point. However, everything I have been saying here, framed as it is by the Cross of Reality, is eminently testable! No matter how spiritual, it can still be proved to be true—by combinations of logic and experiment. This theme is taken up by Rosenstock-Huessy in one of his finest essays, “The Uni-versity of Logic, Language, and Literature.” Like him, in this book, I try to speak no words that abandon the tests of logic, evidence, and verification. Rosenstock-Huessy addressed this point when he wrote:
Language is a process that can be weighed and measured and listened to and can be physically experienced. It goes on before our eyes and ears. Is it not strange that the science of this lifeblood of society should not be exalted to the rank of social research?
If you can weigh and measure, you can test. I have been testing these ideas for some 67 years.
The Complete Cross of Reality
Appendix A displays a more complete version of the Cross of Reality than I showed in Chapter 1. While the reader might want to glance at that version now, the many subjects covered in it will make more sense after reading the first seven chapters. I have called this the “complete Cross of Reality” because I liked the alliteration of two c’s, and it is complete as far as this book’s topics are concerned. But there are countless further categories of human experience that could be added to it; the ones shown here are simply those I have found to be the most important.
Now I should enter a sort of quit-claim on this cross. Certainly life, and especially the life of the spirit, cannot be reduced to a diagram. The Cross of Reality is no automatic “Open, Sesame” to perceiving all the truth or solving all our problems, be they secular or religious, personal or social.
In other words, its usefulness as a model or method depends entirely on the imagination, resources, and energy with which we apply it to understanding and dealing with those problems.
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