Without participation in the life of the word through the ages, we remain ephemeral. Speaking, thinking, learning, teaching, writing, are the processes into which we must be immersed to become beings. They enable us to occupy a present in the midst of flux. Language receives us into its community; speech admits us to the common boat of humanity in its struggle for orientation on its pilgrimage through space and time.
—Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
Norwich, Vermont – January 1, 2007 – So thoroughly smitten was I by Eugen in the early 1940s that, as I said in the Prologue, I’ve pursued his work quite steadily ever since. Returning to finish 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 Libby and me.
I turned this 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 translates 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, certainly for me, was the way that Eugen showed us how everything we know is connected, how everything relates.
.An Alternate Consilience
Therefore, as this chapter continues to introduce the Cross of Reality, I’ll be describing how that cross relates everything we know, from the natural to the social sciences, from history to theology. Along the way, I’ll start explaining Eugen’s insights on language, for those remarkable insights are what enabled him to make the links between all our realms of knowledge, and especially to show the connection between matter and spirit. When we see that connection, we're well on our way to reconciling science and religion.
To introduce this theme, I’ll turn to Edward O. Wilson’s 1998 book Consilience, which had the subtitle “The Unity of Knowledge” (which is what he meant by “consilience”). For this chapter will be about the kind of consilience that Wilson was after, although I’ll claim he didn’t find it. 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, as I’ll argue in this book, eludes him. (For readers who haven’t had to suffer through courses of philosophy, “empiricism” refers to knowledge gained through the senses, through life experience or experiment; it is knowledge that can be tested and verified by further experience.)
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, on the one hand, with the social sciences and humanities, on the other. 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 relate not at all to the frontiers established by future and past times, nor to the frontier of the “space” within the self. The laws of physics have nothing to say about what Eugen called the obvious goal of all social science: the creation of peace between individuals, groups, and nations. We live on four frontiers, not two that can be reduced to one!
Argo Books
While I’ll soon continue on the theme of how everything is connected, I want to pause now to say more about Eugen—and my special connections with him.
W. H. Auden once told me that he’d read everything of my professor’s that he could lay his hands on. That was in 1969, when I’d become Eugen’s US publisher—and was hoping the famed poet would write a foreword for one of our books. Auden came through with a fine recollection of Eugen’s influence on him. He cited Eugen’s motto Respondeo etsi mutabor (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.”
Needless to say, my little publishing venture, Argo Books, launched with the help of Eugen’s friend Freya von Moltke, was a labor of love. The thirty-seven 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.
I’ll delay until later some remarks on how other prominent thinkers were as helpful as Auden to Eugen’s cause. I’ll simply note here that these included, in the field of religion, Harvey Cox, Leslie Dewart, Martin Marty, Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Ong, and Richard Schaull. Among social critics who similarly hailed his work were Peter Berger, Lewis Mumford, and David Riesman.
Sabine Bonhoeffer’s Article
In 1963, when I learned that Bonhoeffer’s sister Sabine was a member of the German Rosenstock-Huessy Society, I suggested that she write an article to point out how similar her brother’s thought was to Eugen’s. She was delighted to do so, and 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.”
My mention of Freya von Moltke just above brings up another important connection of Eugen with Bonhoeffer. In the early 1930s Freya’s husband Helmuth, a scion of Germany’s greatest military family, formed the Kreisau Kreis (Kreisau Circle), one of the few resistance groups against Hitler.
Now Eugen has rightly been called the spiritual father of that group because most of its members got to know each other in 1929 when they collaborated with Eugen and Helmuth to found what became a German movement for voluntary service. That move-ment got under way through a number of work camps that brought university students, young farmers, and miners together for community service and discussions of pressing social concerns. Thus, at Camp William James, we thought of Helmuth as our forerunner.
As Sabine reports, Bonhoeffer knew all about the Kreisau Kreis—and met with Helmuth several times. While he 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, while Helmuth was arrested in January 1944 and executed in January 1945.
George Kennan, who’d served in the US embassy in Berlin just before the war, later wrote a remarkable testimonial about Helmuth: “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 Helmuth-Bonhoeffer-Eugen history undoubtedly had something to do with what 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 Eugen as the three twentieth century religious thinkers who’d still be important in the third millennium. I should also note that, as Argo Books was getting under way, England’s Bishop Robinson, of Honest to God fame, twice sent me encouraging notes; evidently, he too saw Eugen’s work as in a class with Bonhoeffer’s and Tillich’s.
The Problem with Genius
When I wrote in December 1940 that I and many of his students were “completely smitten” by Eugen, I might have added that we were more aware that we were hearing something important than we were sure about how we’d describe just what that “something” was. I think 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, I think we sensed that the Cross of Reality showed how everything is connected.
Yet, for me, and I suspect for many other of his students, there would have to be many years of further reading in Eugen’s work, especially his works on language, before we’d be ready to say, in our own words, exactly how the Cross of Reality gave us such a unifying perspective. Eugen spoke more as a prophet than as one who tidied up after the volcanic eruptions of what was clearly original thought.
I think that helps explain why Eugen remains “undiscovered” to this day, while his friends Tillich and Karl Barth (1886-1968) became about our best-known theologians. Tillich put his finger on it when he said that “when Eugen speaks, it’s like lightning.” Flashes of genius need to be clarified by their author or his circle. This issue was addressed by Martin Marty in 1966, when he reviewed Eugen’s most popular book, The Christian Future (first published in 1946). Welcoming its republication, Marty noted that he’d been a long-time admirer of Eugen’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 returned to the question of Eugen’s disconcerting originality when he recently wrote the following to a friend of mine: “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.”
Another friend of mine has explained Eugen’s 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’ve made up the circle gathered round him, so far unsuccessful in making the breakthrough, constantly comfort ourselves with that thought.
Ending the Conflict between Science and Religion
It took me seven years, until the summer of 1948, before I’d made much progress on my 1941 commitment to turn parts of this journal into a book about the Cross of Reality, and even then I’d finished only five chapters. So involved was I with researching and rewriting them—to say nothing of having to spend some time earning a living—that it wasn’t until 1965 that I began to show parts of this emerging book to Eugen. He replied with a letter saying that I had “hit the nail on the head and stepped on many toes.”
The main point I’d made in the selections I gave him—and the point I’ll now make in the balance of this chapter—is that Eugen has succeeded in showing us how to end the conflict between science and religion, the conflict that began with Copernicus (1473-1543), continued with Galileo (1564-1642) and Descartes (1596-1650), went public with Voltaire (1694-1778) and Rousseau (1712-1778)—and finally came to a head with Darwin (1809-1882) and Freud (1856-1939).
I’ve rehearsed those names and years to show that the stand-off between science and religion is really quite recent. For the 6,000 years or so of recorded history, and the roughly 40,000 years of tribal life before that, religion was evidently the essential framework, the house, in which all humankind was sheltered. Secular art was rare until the Reformation of 1517. Natural science was not born until two generations later—if we recognize Galileo as its founder. Only over the last three hundred years has the religious foundation been shattered by the rise of natural science.
As one who has lived close to thirty percent of those three hundred years, 1700 seems almost like yesterday. My grandfather Edward Gardner, a Presbyterian minister, was born in 1838, 169 years ago. Main Street in Norwich is lined with homes from the 1820s, and when the town was settled, in the late 1700s, it was a Congregationalist theocracy. Across the Connecticut River, Dartmouth had required chapel services until 1890.
How Everything is Connected
Thus, what we Dartmouth students heard from Eugen in 1940 was part of a very recent battle. He gave us the impression that he’d made a successful counter-attack on Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Freud—and had tamed Darwin. To many of us, he seemed like an Einstein of the human sciences. He reoriented our post-Enlightenment minds to show us how everything is connected.
To introduce my justification of that bold claim, I’ll quote Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). The famed mathematician, whose thoughts on religion still seem alive today, wrote: “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.”
Now it seems to me that the Cross of Reality shows us precisely how a body can be united to a spirit. Once we can imagine that, we’re well on our way to understanding how everything is connected, from the most material to the most spiritual.
Speech is the Body of the Spirit
In fact, the most important thing to say about the Cross of Reality is that it shows us how the actions of the spirit in us are parallel to, indeed the same as, the actions of language in us. I’ll devote the next chapter to a full development of this theme, but I’ll introduce it here, since it’s Eugen’s (and thus my) main contribution to Christianity’s new paradigm.
The reader will have noted the four quotations from Eugen which I used for this book’s opening epigraphs. Let me repeat them, since they clarify what I mean by equating 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 grasp 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. If that’s so, we do not need to struggle to believe in God; we only have to recognize his constant creative presence in us. Of course, there’s 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 which creates future time and ties us to the past; it is speech which enables us to have an inner space and deal with the world outside us. And it is grammar itself, that apparently technical thing, which creates these realities for us. In fact, we live in a four-fold reality, created by four basic kinds of speech:
1. Imperative 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.
Let me begin to spell out how we hear those different kinds of speech.
First, as we listen to the imperatives which we hear from others, initially from our parents and teachers, then perhaps from clergy or people we admire, we hear ourselves being addressed as thou. (This intimate form for “you,” sounds archaic in English but perfectly normal in European languages; for example, in German, it is the personal du, as contrasted with the impersonal Sie.)
When we hear ourselves being addressed personally as thou, such speech comes to us with force; imperatives establish our calling to make the future, not only for ourselves but for all humanity. In The Multiformity of Man, this was our infinity equation: ∞=1.
In response to having been so addressed, we discover our I, our subjective and inward self (our inner space). The Multiformity’s singular: 1=1.
We then seek to return the gift of having been addressed 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 Multiformity’s 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 Multiformity’s 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 aren’t simply “out there,” waiting for us to discover them. Instead, the four basic kinds of language create those four different orientations and mold us into those four different grammatical persons. It is speech which creates inward and outward space as well as backward and forward time. (In nature, time has no forward movement, as I’ll explain in Chapter 13.)
Eugen 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.
I think those words answer Pascal’s question. We can imagine how the body can be united to a spirit 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.
Now Eugen 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, it. What I’ll continue to do, throughout this book, is 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 forty thousand 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 or Egypt, already flourishing by 3,000 B.C., 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 B.C. 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 prayer and prophecy.
With the coming of the Christian era, those four ancient modes of speech were fused. After Christ, we no longer felt bound by a single orientation. We were no longer simply Greek or Jew, Egyptian or tribesman. For two thousand 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, becoming in effect the narrow middle in the hourglass of history. Since that center-time human history has become one story.
Western History
Just as he told pre-Christian history in terms of four kinds of speech, so Eugen saw these four kinds 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. In Chapter 5 we’ll consider how each of the six great revolutions had different impulses:
1. The Papal Revolution had a messianic orientation toward the future.
2. The German Reformation emphasized our inner conscience.
3. The British Parliamentary or Puritan Revolution celebrated the laws and traditions
of the past.
4. The French Revolution focused on the outer front, where reason and objectivity
hold sway.
5. The American Revolution was a happy combination of impulses from both the
French and the British.
6. 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 I visited Eugen frequently at Four Wells; we’d talk for an hour or so in his sunny study on the second floor. Sometimes I’d bring a book I was reading, like 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 or 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 which influences our actions. We enter the world pretty much as a tabula rasa, a blank slate, and become what has been spoken into us.
I myself found more in Jung than Eugen did. Jung’s conviction that there are always four aspects of psychological orientation has more than a hint of the Cross of Reality in it. Then I found compelling Jung’s idea that something resembling religion was needed and present in everyone, whether they liked to call it religion or not. Still, I agreed with Eugen 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, as it were, 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, the great Jesuit paleontologist had described evolution as the progressive “inspiriting” of matter. I remember how I told Eugen about how I’d compared his thought with Teilhard’s in one of our church discussion groups. Not surprisingly, I’d 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 calls “radial energy.” In man he calls it “consciousness.” The story of evolution, our narrative history, he describes as the continual growth of that spiritual energy. It takes form in the outer world, which he calls “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.
Eugen was pleased when I told him about a correction I’d made to Teilhard’s description of today’s earth as a “noosphere” (from the Greek noos, “mind”). I said it would be better to call it an “orasphere” (from the Latin orare, “to speak.”) He was also pleased that I did not 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
Eugen 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 proceeded to do. Instead, he thought that the old concerns of theology should be taken up by new disciplines, such as the higher sociology which he envisioned as metanomics.
Eugen’s most accessible thought on Christianity is in The Christian Future. One line in that work has been running as an undercurrent in my mind as I’ve 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 Eugen 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.
In Chapter 6 I’ll describe how Eugen’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 which is expressed in Berdyaev’s proposal that we think of God as being “like a whole humanity.”
Also in Chapter 6, I’ll describe how the first three orientations on the Cross of Reality relate to the persons of the Trinity. For a preview: imperative speech, calling us to the future, relates to revelation and the Holy Spirit; the 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
David Riesman, the famed American sociologist, who I’ve already noted was an admirer of Eugen’s, once said: “The great religions all think in terms of connectedness. Everything is related to everything else.” I’d add that all great philosophies aim to think in just such holistic terms—and that Eugen’s envisioned new discipline, his metanomics, has that same aim.
The preceding reflections on the subjects of history, psychology, evolution, and theology, all aimed at showing the connectedness of Eugen’s thinking, were triggered by Pascal’s question of how can we think of a body as being united to a spirit. I’ve answered that the Cross of Reality shows us just how that can be. By the end of this book I hope to have shown how that cross is an image of how everything is connected. Descartes, natural science, and reason have not really been dismissed in this post-Cartesian perspective. They’ve simply been relegated to the objective front of our four-front experience.
Respondeo etsi mutabor
I think of the Cross of Reality as depicting a third framework for our thinking, beyond those of natural science and theology. Eugen sought to capture the character of this third framework in that motto which Auden cited, Respondeo etsi mutabor (I respond although I will be changed). One of my earliest notes about Eugen’s work concerned this motto. Here it is:
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 stream roll by. 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 standpoint. From the theological perspective we certainly did not think of ourselves as doubting or 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 standpoints 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 “the power which makes us speak.” And the power that forces us to give answer. The Cross of Reality shows us that any significant experience in our lives 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’re not sure whether we should respond. We’re 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 his 2004 blockbuster book, The End of Faith, Sam Harris says you can’t prove that any religious propositions are true; there’s no evidence for them. Perhaps, if you frame such propositions in traditional language, Harris has a point. However, everything I’ve 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 Eugen in one of his finest essays, “The Uni-versity of Logic, Language, and Literature.” Like him, in this chapter and this book, I try to speak no words which abandon the tests of logic, evidence, and verification. Eugen 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’ve been testing these ideas for some sixty-seven years.
The Complete Cross of Reality
I’ll close this chapter with a page displaying a more complete version of the Cross of Reality than I showed in Chapter 1. And I urge the reader to keep referring to this diagram as you continue through the book.
I’ve 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’ve found to be the most important.
Now I should enter a sort of quit-claim on this cross. I can image many a red-blooded reader exclaiming that life, and especially the life of the spirit, cannot be reduced to a diagram. And I hasten to agree. 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 model or method depend entirely on the imagination, resources, and energy with which we apply it to understanding and dealing with those problems. [The cross art, to appear at the center of the text below, will be inserted early in November.]
Language: Subjective Speech
Orientation: The Inner Person (“inner space”)
Literature: Lyric
Person & Mood: I – Subjunctive
Fields : Literature, the Arts, Philosophy, Psychology
Religious Aspect: Personal redemption – Son
Stage in experience: Second
Social Breakdown: Anarchy
Language: Narrative Speech Language: Imperative Speech
Orientation: Past Time Orientation: Future Time
Literature: Epic Literature: Dramatic
Person & Mood: We - Person & Mood: Thou –
Narrative Imperative
+
Fields: History, Fields: Politics, Religion
Anthropology, Law
Religious Aspect: Creation Religious Aspect: Revelation
– Father – Spirit
Stage in experience: Third Stage in experience: First
Social Breakdown: Decadence Social Breakdown: Revolution
Language: Objective Speech
Orientation: The Outer World (outside space)
Literature: Prosaic
Person & Mood: He, She, They, It – Indicative
Fields: Natural Science, Mathematics, Economics
Religious Aspect: The world’s redemption
Stage in experience: Fourth
Social Breakdown: War
T H E C R O S S O F R E A L I T Y
1. A dynamic model of how we are formed by language and live within the
tensions of four speech-created orientations.
2. A unifying picture of what we know, one that relates and integrates all our knowledge of the human sciences, natural science, and theology.
3. A universal method of personal and social analysis; this dialogical method
includes the scientific method but enlarges on it.
To continue, click: Chapter 3 The Spirit as Speech