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Chapter 2, p. 40:
An Alternate Consilience
To focus on the theme of reconciling science and religion, we can turn to Edward O. Wilson’s Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. His first intimation of consilience, he says, was when, in college, he experienced “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 important 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.
Chapter 2, pp.44-46:
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:
1. Imperative (or vocative) speech, calling us to the future.
2. Subjective speech, addressing the inner self.
3. Narrative speech, telling our history.
4. Objective speech, analyzing the world outside us.
Chapter 2, pp.50-51:
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 supernatural 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.
Chapter 3, pp. 59-63:
Revelation Is Orientation
Of the many seminal ideas that Rosenstock-Huessy gave to Rosenzweig, there is one that seems immensely fruitful, and incredibly concise: “Revelation is orientation.” Rosenzweig considered this a breakthrough insight, one that integrated religious revelation, creation, and redemption with what goes on in our daily lives.
Reflecting on what Rosenstock-Huessy meant by “revelation is orientation,” I have come to see it as telling us what happens to us in the interior language of prayer. Not prayer as sponsored by organized religion, but prayer as engaged in by all human beings, whether they are religious or not. Prayer in this larger sense is not like reaching up to be in touch with an all-powerful divine Father who can advise, guide, intervene, and save. Instead, it is like centering oneself at a place where one’s interior life meets one’s tasks in the exterior world. And like drawing strength from one’s own past, and the past of the whole race, as one seeks to find the way into a meaningful future. At this center of the cross in which we live, God reveals himself to us. Revelation becomes a new orientation to the times of our personal history and all history, just as it becomes a new orientation of our inner self to the world outside us.
High Speech
We can now see that Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig have raised our understanding of language from being simply a mode of communication to something at a distinctly higher level. They have enabled us to perceive speech as the body of the spirit, indeed as the body of the Holy Spirit.
But their concerns were not simply in the realm of spirituality or religion. Both Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig were clear that they were working toward disclosing a method for the human sciences, including philosophy and theology, just as surely as Descartes perceived that his goal was a new method for natural science (one he thought would apply to all realms of knowledge).
At the time of the First World War, when Rosenstock and Rosenzweig began their conspiracy against the accepted wisdom of that era, anthropology and psychology were quite new disciplines. The leading lights in each were inclined to treat language simply as a wonderful tool, the means by which we communicate with each other, a way of transferring ideas out of one mind and into another. Rosenstock and Rosenzweig, by contrast, saw language as something much more fundamental and more marvelous: Language had turned us into human beings—and eventually into religious human beings.
Rosenstock-Huessy’s essay, “The Origin of Speech,” distinguishes between two kinds of speech. On the one hand, we have the formal or high speech that we use “to sing a chorale, to stage tragedy, to enact laws, to compose verse, to say grace, to take an oath, to confess one’s sins, to file a complaint, to write a biography, to make a report, to solve an algebraic problem, to baptize a child, to sign a marriage contract, to bury one’s father.” On the other hand, we have the informal or low speech that we might use to show “a man the direction to the next farm on the road” or to stop “a child from crying.” Such low speech, which makes up “our daily chatter and prattle,” often serves “the same purposes as animal sounds.”
It was only after reading that “Origin” essay that I came to understand what Rosenstock-Huessy meant by “high speech.” He meant the intentional, relational, and dialogical speech, the fully articulated speech we use when we seek to tell the truth or establish relations with others. It is the language we use to advance any cause, large or small, social or personal. It is not the language we use when we say, “Please pass the salt” or “Goodbye.” But it is rare to go through a day without using this higher form of speech. As a matter of fact, there is a vestige of high speech in “Please pass the salt,” since “Please” establishes a cordial relationship. Similarly, “Goodbye” is a vestigial remnant of its origin in the heartfelt blessing, “God be with you.”
The higher kind of speech is “bound to time and nourished by time,” as Rosenzweig expressed it. Whenever we use such speech, we create a tension between past and future; we speak to change the listener and our times.
It also helps to grasp the idea of high speech when we make a distinction between what we mean by language and what we mean by speech. Language can be simply any use of words, while true speech involves not only speaking but listening. The word that we have heard from another stays with us and frames what we do, from our smallest to our largest actions.
In other words, high speech always implies its own enactment. The words that initiate such speech stay alive and guide us through their realization. We never leave the fields of force created by high speech, from a well-timed word of encouragement from a parent or teacher to an order given in combat.
While it is certainly not always the higher form, even what goes on inside our minds is speech. As Rosenstock-Huessy puts it, “thinking is nothing but a storage room for speech.”
The Many Kinds of High Speech
Although Rosenstock-Huessy emphasizes the spoken word in his writings, he certainly suggests that allintentional and truth-telling human expression is high speech. From the first drawings of a bison in caves, to tribal dancing and chanting, to a symphony by Beethoven, to a painting by Paul Klee, to a house by Frank Lloyd Wright, to a book by Dostoevsky, to a poem by Robert Frost, we speak about who we are, we keep the past alive, and we feel called to our future.
So speech is not simply words. It is not simply our informal chatter or the tool we use to survive, though those are “low” speech. It is not simply earnest dialogue, debate, drama or sermon, although those are “high” forms of speech. It is not only what we say with our mouths; it is also what we write on paper as poetry, literature, or drama. Beyond all those word forms, speech is any fully serious human expression, from a hug or caress to a dance or a symphony.
High speech is even serious humor. Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” is a good example. In humor we show that we can juggle the different kinds of speech; we play with them. Indeed, humor is a vital kind of speech, lubricating, as it were, the transmission of all the others. As serious a philosopher as Solovyov wrote a humorous satire about himself—and once defined man as the laughing animal. Rosenstock-Huessy’s culminating chapter in Out of Revolution is titled “The Survival Value of Humor.” There he says, “Common sense…acts on the principle that a man who fails to apply laughing and weeping in the discovery of vital truth simply is immature.”
High speech becomes frozen in the architecture of our buildings and the environments we create in our towns and cities; it is expressed by our monuments and gravestones. In fact, everything we create, every form of human expression, is a form of speech. Even thinking and prayer, or reading, are acts of speech inside us. They resonate and reflect on the open speech that carries us through life.
This understanding of speech accounts for the deaf and blind, people like Helen Keller. The miracle of Helen Keller's life was brought about by the loving care of her family and her teacher-friend Anne Sullivan. If they had never “talked” to her, she would never have uttered a word, and the name Helen Keller would mean nothing to us.
So high speech includes all language, verbal and non-verbal, that serves a constructive social purpose, all language that is intentional, relational, or seeks to tell the truth. Examples of what it does not include are chatter, gossip, ranting, lying, propaganda, and advertising.
The most important thing to say about high speech is that it frames and determines all our actions in life. Any social act is the carrying out of an intention that had been created in us through listening first, then responding inside ourselves, and finally deciding to do something. The action is simply the outer completion of the speech that began as an inner listening. All our experiences from birth to death are framed by what is spoken to us and what we reply. We are the most plastic of all creatures; we are the receptacles and organs of speech.
If our personal lives are framed by speech, so our history has been created through speech. Our entire organization and interpretation of the world are accomplished through what we have heard from preceding generations and what we say to the next. Through speech we learn what it is to have a future and a past. Without speech we would not be conscious of historical time. With our consciousness of time, of timing, of seizing the right moment, and saying the right word, we place ourselves at the center of the creative process. The story of human progress is the story of when we have said the right words at the right time.
Politics is not so much the art of the possible as it is the art of the spoken word. We attain political office, or any significant position in life, through what we are able to say, and especially through what we are able to say without advance preparation. It is what we say without a written speech, when we are on our feet before an audience, that enables our listeners to decide whether we can be trusted as leaders in our times. If we cannot think and talk on our feet, then the public quite rightly knows that we will not be able to act on our feet when the time comes for us to take immediate action. The complete person, the whole person, the person who can be trusted with great responsibility, is the person whose speech comes so naturally that one senses his or her integrity. Indeed, a person's integrity is the coincidence of thinking, speaking, and acting.
Chapter 3, pp. 68-70:
I Have Been Spoken to, Therefore I Am
We can now also perceive why speech is a more fundamental category in the human phenomenon than reason or thinking. All significant human experience—personal, social, and historical—takes place in the context of speech and can be interpreted by a full understanding of speech. Our lives are framed by the speech of others; our own contribution to history is what we “say” by word and deed. As persons we are simply the embodiment of speech. Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” We reply, “No, René, you have it wrong. What you really mean is, ‘I have been spoken to, therefore I am.’”
Our presentation of the four forms of speech tells us that, in the human community, speech does much more than express ideas; it establishes relationships. When used for its purpose, such “high speech” establishes peaceful or healthy relationships—for us as individuals, as groups, or as nations—with all our speech partners.
When we perceive speech in it fullness, we overcome our inheritance from Aristotle and Descartes: imagining that being rational is the main goal of the human mind. What the Cross of Reality shows us, as it arrays the four forms of speech—in their relationship to changing the times and renewing the self and the world—is that our goal is to be “supra-rational.” That is, reason (with its objectivity) should always be present in any complete experience of thinking, speaking, and acting. It is simply that reason does not trump the other three ways we apprehend reality or tell the full truth.
William James on the Soul
The philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910) said he would rather not say anything about the soul until he could grasp the pragmatic significance of that term. What we have described above as our four speech orientations, seen as one sequence informing any important human experience, may also be seen, quite pragmatically, as describing the formation of the soul.
Our soul—or in secular terms, our psyche—is what we form when we move responsively through all four speech orientations. It is our power, expressed by speech and act, to live so that we represent past and future times and inner and outer spaces. Our soul grows larger the more we feel compelled to listen and speak imperatively, subjectively, narratively, and objectively.
Our soul does not belong to some other world, or go to some other world, as religious thought often suggests. No; the soul is the way we incarnate the word down here.
Logos: In Heraclitus and St. John
While it is quite correct to see Rosenstock-Huessy’s and Rosenzweig’s understanding of language as something genuinely new, it is also, paradoxically, quite correct to see it as something very old. Indeed, it dates from one Greek man who is often called the first philosopher, Heraclitus (530-470 B.C.), and another man whom we might call the first Christian theologian, St. John of the Fourth Gospel.
Heraclitus had used the word Logos when he said: “We should let ourselves be guided by what is common to all. Yet, although the Logos is common to all, most men live as if each of them had a private intelligence of his own.” We will never know for sure whether Heraclitus meant “speech” or “reason” when he wrote those words about Logos, but they seem to make more sense if he meant “speech,” something that links men with each other, overcoming their tendency to live privately.
The Gospel of St. John opens with the imperishable words: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God...and the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” In the original text, St. John used Logos for Word. Here it is more certain that he meant “speech,” since it is hard to imagine “reason” becoming flesh in Christ. It was “the living word” that came to dwell in the flesh. (I am capitalizing Logos throughout this book since I am presenting it both as the religious Word of God and as the living word spoken by all humankind.)
In view of what St. John and Heraclitus said of speech, what Rosenstock and Rosenzweig were “discovering” in 1916 could hardly be older. They were rediscovering something that had become obscured by more than two millennia of timeless Platonic philosophizing and Aristotelian metaphysics.
That is why Rosenzweig was justified in his extravagant claim about replacing the methods of all earlier philosophies. The two millennia of obscuring also explain the slowness in the recognition of what these two men were discovering. Our minds have been super-saturated with the abstract, objectifying thought of Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes.
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