All speech is the precipitation of the intensified respiration which we experience as members of a community, and which is called the Spirit.
—Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
The spirit of man is the Holy Spirit. —Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
One knew that the distinction between immanence and transcendence disappears in language. —Franz Rosenzweig
It was during the First World War that the ideas I’m presenting here first saw the light of day. Eugen was fighting on the western front at Verdun, while his close friend, Franz Rosenzweig, was stationed on the eastern front in Macedonia. Throughout the summer of 1916 these two young men engaged in an intense trench-to-trench correspondence on Judaism and Christianity. Their letters were later published—and have been widely discussed. The Jewish scholar Hans Schoeps described them as “the purest form of Judaeo-Christian dialogue ever attained, perhaps even for ages to come.”
In his final letter of December 1916, Franz asked Eugen to tell him more about his new understanding of language. Eugen replied in early 1917 with such a long letter that it eventually became the text for a small book, one that was published in 1924 as Angewandte Seelenkunde (“Practical Knowledge of the Soul”).
After the war, Franz became famous for his 1921 book, The Star of Redemption, a contemporary interpretation of Judaism and Christianity based largely on understanding speech as God’s action in us. Revelation, Redemption, and Creation, he said, are continuing processes in human life, not one-time biblical events.
“Man became man when he first spoke,” Franz wrote. True speech is revelation itself. As he put it, “one knew that the distinction between immanence and transcendence disappears in language.” Franz actually began writing The Star in 1918, over a year after his correspondence with Eugen. And he gratefully acknowledged that “the main influence” for his book had been that letter on language which Eugen had sent to him at the end of 1916.
Shattered by their experience of the war, both Eugen and Franz felt that timeless abstract philosophizing and theologizing no longer addressed what really happened in our lives. After the war Eugen wrote that “new thinking always begins with a new experience of death.” He pointed out that Franz had opened The Star with these words: “From death, and from the fear of death alone, springs all knowledge. Philosophy tries to throw off the fear of things earthly, to rob death of its poisonous sting.”
The dialogue between Eugen and Franz was remarkably deep and creative. As I’ve noted earlier, Eugen’s parents were Jewish, but they were not religiously observant. He had first met Franz, two years his senior, in 1911, when they’d both gone to a scholarly conference in Baden-Baden. On the evening of July 7, 1913, in Leipzig, they had a long conversation on religion, as a result of which Franz decided that he should abandon his Jewish heritage, to which he felt little attachment, and adopt Christianity. However, he decided to attend one final synagogue service, the Day of Atonement, October 11. Hearing the sound of the ram’s horn at that service so moved him that he reversed his decision; he proceeded to become a profoundly believing Jew. As The Star reveals, however, his profound belief was matched by a profoundly contemporary conception of what belief really means.
In a 1924 essay entitled Das Neue Denken (“the New Thinking”), Franz clarified the ideas he’d presented in The Star. One bold claim he made in “The New Thinking” was that the “method of speech,” which he and Eugen were developing, would “replace the methods of all earlier philosophies.” Whether Franz’s extravagant claim can be justified, of course, is an underlying theme of the present book.
It’s worth noting that the last decade has seen an explosion of interest in Rosenzweig. Mark Lilla reviewed eleven recent books by or about him in the December 2002 New York Review of Books. Unfortunately, Lilla shows not the slightest interest in Eugen. Instead, he calls him Franz’s “confused young friend.” Dismissing the “new thinking” on language as of little significance, Lilla sees Franz primarily as an innovative thinker on Judaism and Christianity. I was not surprised by Lilla’s flippant remark about Eugen; it’s a classic example of academe’s response to him.
The Law of Motion of the Spirit
Academics generally don’t want language to be tainted by “spirit,” which evaporated for most of them with the Enlightenment. For a Lilla, “New thinking” about speech and the spirit, giving rise to “the method of speech” is simply confusing.
Of course, it is the method of speech that is made visible on the Cross of Reality. Indeed, that cross is best understood as a dynamic model of just how speech works in us. It shows us that we live in an infinitely richer realm than that described to us by natural science or by most traditional theology. One of my early morning notes tried to capture this—in quite personal terms:
We are neither the cold observers of the world outside us nor the faithful children of a God above. Instead, living at reality’s heart, we are the agents for the evolution as well as the revolution of matter and spirit. There is no outside prime mover like the God of Descartes, Spinoza, or the deists. Nor is there a Supreme Being, above and beyond, like the God of theism. The only motion of the spirit is within human souls and between human souls. God speaks, or fails to speak, in each of us. He is infinitely close, not infinitely distant.
Now, if the only motion of the spirit is in and between us, is it possible to describe that motion? It seems to me that Eugen is suggesting a specific law of motion of the spirit. This law, showing us how the spirit moves within us and how the soul is formed, becomes clear only when we realize that spirit is not something nebulous in the air. Rather, spirit is audible; it is the higher kind of all human speech. And such speech does not have an infinite variety of forms. As I said in Chapter 2, there are only four basic kinds of speech—and they move us through the four stages of any significant experience. To restate and expand on Chapter 2’s presentation:
1. Imperative (vocative) speech is what calls us to the future. We hear ourselves addressed as thou. Such speech wakes us up and inclines us to respond. Go thou! Fulfill what you’re called to do.
2. Subjective (poetic, prayerful, and philosophical) speech is what we use to address our inner self, our I. Now the grammatical mood becomes subjunctive. What if I were to go? Inner questioning arises in response to the pressure of imperatives.
3. Narrative (historical) speech enables us to recall past time or tell the current history of our lives. We becomes our grammatical person because creative action requires more than one person. We went, or we are going. Learning from what has happened in the past, we start interacting with others.
4. Objective (scientific) speech makes it possible for us to analyze the world outside us. Now we and others can see ourselves as he, she or they. She went; they went. No longer “moved” by speech, we step back and assess what is going on.
Those four stages of any memorable experience are universal and inevitable for all of us. As we move through them, we are conjugated into those four different grammatical persons: thou, I, we, he or she.
This law of motion of the spirit is central to what I’m calling “the dialogical method.” As noted above, Franz called it “the speech method” and Eugen often called it “the grammatical method.” All three names refer to the same thing. Similarly, sometimes this focus on language is called dialogical thinking and sometimes it’s called speech thinking. Whatever it’s called, it appears that its first 20th century expression was in that 1916 letter of Eugen’s to Franz which was published as Practical Knowledge of the Soul. A key statement in that little book runs as follows:
Does the soul have a grammar? Now, as the Word comes out of the soul, and the truest Word comes straight from the very depths of the soul, .…then, just as the mind has logic, the soul will have a sense of the way words fit together—that is, “grammar”—as its inner structure….He who would explore the soul must fathom the secrets of language.
Those secrets, in their simplest form, have just been revealed above. A key secret is that language turns us into the four grammatical persons: thou, I, we, he or she—and in that order. A related secret is that language, more surely than reason, creates our sense of the future and the past, our inner selves, and the outer world.
High Speech
In the balance of this chapter, I’ll continue to explore the character and purpose of the four basic kinds of speech, with the goal of making clear that Eugen and Franz were discovering something quite new. Raising our understanding of language to a distinctly higher level, they enable 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 Franz and Eugen were clear that they were working toward disclosing a method for the human sciences, including theology, just as surely as Descartes perceived that his goal was a new method for natural science (one he thought would apply to all the sciences). Thus, while this chapter will be devoted to Eugen’s understanding of speech, it will offer strong hints that we are approaching a method. That a method has, in fact, been discovered, and what that method is, will be the topic of the next chapter.
At the time of the First World War, when Eugen and Franz began their conspiracy against the accepted wisdom of that era, anthropology and psychology were quite new disciplines. The leading lights in both 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 in to another. Eugen and Franz, by contrast, saw language as something much more fundamental and more marvelous: it was language which had turned us into human beings—and eventually into religious human beings. As Christian and Jew, they perceived the higher forms of language as the very body of the Spirit.
What do I mean—and what did they mean—by the “higher” forms of language? It was not until I’d read Eugen’s essay “The Origin of Speech” that I myself became completely clear about that question. There he distinguishes between two kinds of speech. On the one hand, we have the formal or high speech which 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 which 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.”
Through that “Origin” essay, and then many others, I came to understand what Eugen meant by language in its higher form. 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’s the language we use to advance any cause, large or small, social or personal. It’s not the language we use when we say “please pass the salt” or “goodbye,” but it’s rare that we go through a day without using this higher form of speech. As a matter of fact, there’s a vestige of high speech in “please pass the salt,” since the word “please” establishes a cordial relationship. Similarly, “goodbye” is a vestigial remnant of its origin in the heartfelt blessing, “God be with you.”
The higher form of speech is “bound to time and nourished by time,” as Franz 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 a speaking but a listening. The word which 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 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’s certainly not always the higher form, even what goes on inside our minds is speech. As Eugen puts it, “thinking is nothing but a storage room for speech.”
When I completed my first book on Eugen’s work in 1965, the chapter on speech contained the following notes. I read them aloud to him one evening—and he seemed pleased. Thus, with no objection from the master, I’ll repeat them here.
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Speech is not simply words, though it starts with them. 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, though 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. It is even serious humor.
Besides such lively forms, 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 speech inside us. They resonate and reflect on the open speech which carries us through life.
A friend who read an early version of this note complained that my presentation of speech didn’t account for the deaf and blind, like Helen Keller. I hope that what I've just said about speech including all human expression, not simply aural talk, has answered his objection. 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.
High speech includes all language which serves a constructive social purpose, all language which 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 which had been created in us through, first listening, then responding inside ourselves, and finally deciding to do something. The action is simply the outer completion of the speech which 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. From singing tribal sagas, to carving tribal masks, to writing a symphony, our whole organization and interpretation of the world is 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 their integrity. Indeed, a person's integrity is the coincidence of their thinking, speaking, and acting.
Eugen has shown us that all speech takes just four forms—imperative, subjective, narrative, and objective. Those forms, taken together create a Cross of Reality. Now we should focus even more closely on how these quite different ways of speaking orient us throughout our lives.
1. Imperative Speech: Toward Future Time
Imperative speech is what calls us to any undertaking in our lives. It establishes our commitments, loves, avocations, and (if we are fortunate) our vocations. Thus, “vocative,” which emphasizes “calling,” is another name for the imperative. We hear such speech from parents, teachers, or any person whose guidance we seek. We hear it as the Ten Commandments or Isaiah; as Luther's 95 theses or the Declaration of Independence.
To give us a fresh sense of this future-creating speech, and to contrast it with subjective and objective speech, Eugen has proposed that we also call it “prejective” speech.
We hear such speech in the words of anybody who cares for us, addressing us as thou. Any speech which casts a net of faith into the future is a vocative, like “will you marry me?” That’s not a request for information.
A person who is starved for such speech cannot discover who he or she is and therefore cannot speak their own imperatives. Decadence is the inability of one generation to communicate imperatives to the next. All education, therefore, which is not simply technical, aims to create and maintain imperatives. This future-creating speech precedes and determines all the others. Until we sense this orientation, and feel overwhelmed by it, we never really begin anything new in our lives.
In religious terms, it is hard to imagine a resurrection for the person who has not been moved by the imperative—and lives simply for their own time. We are only a little lower than the angels, and we are super-natural, because we are the creature that can hear the call to enter the future.
2. Subjective Speech: Toward Our Inner Space
Subjective speech arises in response to imperatives and vocatives. It creates the “inner space,” where we begin to feel personally responsible for the appropriate answers to life's questions.
Now just why is it that subjective speech follows the imperative in a necessary sequence? What’s the connection between listening to the imperatives of a leader or a teacher who inspired you and going to the theater, listening to music, or simply going for a walk? Well, after you hear somebody tell you to change your ways, you want to stop and sort things out. That’s why the speech that takes us from the call of the future to our inner orientation is in the subjunctive, conditional, or optative mood. We turn inward, start questioning, and consider different responses.
Art, music, literature, poetry—in fact all the voices of culture—are subjective speech. The arts remind us of all the possible ways to reply to imperatives. We can be the doubting Ivan Karamazov or we can be the faithful Alyosha.
A critical kind of interior speech is prayer. Prayer means a concentrated pondering of one’s reply to the callings of the future. For the religious, prayer means a listening to God’s imperatives, a recognizing that we are being addressed. How should I respond—although I know I will be changed?
However, we all participate in prayer, whether we’re religious or not. Constructive prayer does not aim to carry us deeper and deeper into an interior life. It aims to take us momentarily into this interior, and then to becoming more purposefully engaged in solving the crises of our own lives—and the larger crises of society.
We develop our unique personality by selecting, from the many imperatives that address us, the particular callings, the particular causes, that move us to respond. We are not just bundles of nerves, but we are just bundles of responses.
“Go thou,” the prophets of preceding generations say to us. “I'm not sure whether I’ll go,” we reply. As we question and decide just what we’ll do, we discover our identity, our I. We then feel different from “the establishment” of any preceding generation. From an orientation toward the future of the whole race, created by the imperative thou, we proceed to the singular, inward space of the individual who replies I.
3. Narrative Speech: Carrying the Past Forward
We enter historical time when we leave the subjective orientation of I and decide to express ourselves openly in the world. That means taking responsible action with some other person or group. This is our answer to the questioning which went on in our second, interior orientation. It may mean marriage or becoming wedded to one’s career, but in every case it forms a dual relationship: you can’t act historically by yourself. You incorporate, you embody. Therefore, our speech and actions are now in the narrative “mood” and the grammatical person of we.
Marriage is the most obvious dual required to continue creation, but unmarried persons form generative attachments whenever they relate themselves to some significant cause or institution.
Through narrative speech we participate in past time, not only as the world’s history but also as the “current history” of our own lives. Let us consider why narrative speech does not face backward but carries forward. To convey this idea, Eugen suggests that we name our orientation to past time “trajective.” There is no better statement of what trajective speech means than the one made by Vladimir Solovyov in his posthumously-published “The Secret of Progress.” It is a story about a huntsman lost in a forest. Despairing of getting out, he is offered help by a repulsive old woman. She assures him that she can show him the way if he will only carry her across a stream. As he does so, the heavy old lady becomes lighter and lighter; at the other side she’s turned into an enchanting maiden.
Here are Solovyov’s moving words as he comments on this story:
The modern man, hunting after fleeting, momentary goods and elusive fancies, has lost his right path in life. The dark and turbulent stream of life is before him. Time like a woodpecker mercilessly registers the moments that have been lost. Misery and solitude, and afterwards—darkness and perdition. But behind him stands the sacred antiquity of tradition—oh, in what an unattractive form! Well, what of it? Let him only think of what he owes to her; let him with an inner heartfelt impulse revere her grayness, pity her infirmities, feel ashamed of rejecting her because of her appearance. Instead of idly looking out for phantom-like fairies beyond the clouds, let him undertake the labor of carrying this sacred burden across the real stream of history. This is the only way out of his wanderings—the only, because any other would be insufficient, unkind, impious: he could not let the ancient creature perish!
The modern man does not believe in the fairy tale, he does not believe that the decrepit old woman will be transformed into a queen of beauty. But if he does not believe it, so much the better! Why believe in the future reward when what is required is to deserve it by the present effort and self-denying heroism? Those who do not believe in the future of the old and the sacred, must at any rate remember its past. Why should he not carry her across out of reverence for her antiquity, out of pity for her decay, out of shame for being ungrateful? Blessed are the believers: while still standing on this shore they already see through the wrinkles of old age the brilliance of incorruptible beauty. But unbelievers in the future transformation have the advantage of unexpected joy. Both the believers and the unbelievers have the same task: to go forward, taking upon their shoulders the whole weight of antiquity.
4. Objective Speech: Toward the Outside World
Our life in the first three speech orientations comprises all our “high” experience. But we cannot live through these experiences, we cannot complete them, understand them, or be open to new experience, without our fourth orientation via objective speech. Thus, this strictly rational orientation plays as vital a role in our lives as the first three. The only mistake made by today’s academic, scientific, and technology-obsessed minds has been to identify such speech as the primary and supremely “real” one.
Objective speech states as an outward fact what was first a powerful calling (thou), then an inner secret (I), next a shared experience (we), and now is simply a commonplace for everyone (they, he, she, or it).
In our daily lives we hear objective speech whenever we analyze our own or somebody else’s experience. Most journalism is objective speech. So are all the facts and figures, all the data that we use to organize our lives and our economies. Mathematics and statistics are necessarily objective.
The natural sciences, of course, are quite properly, objective, but today’s social sciences suffer from being improperly objective. They ape natural science by adopting its numerical, statistical, and analytical method.
While he devoted all his energies to attacking the dominance of objective speech in today’s world, Eugen never suggested we retreat to our inner orientation or reject our outer. He positively celebrated the role of rational, analytical speech when he wrote:
The fourth phase, analytics, is indispensable, too....In this phase the movement dies and is discarded as merely natural. ‘Nature’ we call everything which exists without ‘you,’ without ‘me’ and without ‘us.’...In the ‘natural’ the act is dismissed.... The fourth phase of speech is the spirit’s death. If we call the impetus by which a total experience subjects one man to the four phases through which the experience is realized ‘spirit,’ i.e., a breath of life, then phase four is the phase in which the spirit dies but the specimen recovers. If phase four did not abstract us from our spells, freedom could not exist to start a new phase.
I have been spoken to, therefore I am
To sum up, speech is the universal human phenomenon. 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 got 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 tendency, inherited from Aristotle and Descartes, to imagine 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.
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That completes the presentation of the four basic kinds of speech which I made in my 1965 book. Taken together with my introductory reflection on a law of motion of the spirit, those notes all advance this chapter’s goal: to show how we live in a quadrilateral of speech, a Cross of Reality. When we perceive the four ways in which speech forms our souls, we also perceive that speech is the body of the spirit, in both secular and religious terms. As Eugen put it, “the spirit of man is the Holy Spirit.”
There were four other notes in my 1965 book which I think belong in this chapter. They follow.
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William James on the Soul
William James (1842-1910), America’s famed philosopher and psychologist, said he’d rather not say anything about the soul until he could grasp the pragmatic significance of that term. What I’ve described above as our four speech orientations, seen as one sequence informing any important human experience, may also be seen, I think quite pragmatically, as describing the formation of the soul.
Our soul, 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, it is the way we incarnate the word down here.
Logos: In Heraclitus and St. John
While it is quite correct to see Eugen and Franz’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 man who is often called the first philosopher, the Greek Heraclitus (530-470 B.C.) and another man who we might call the first Christian theologian, St. John of the Fourth Gospel.
Heraclitus had used the word “Logos” when he said these oft-quoted words: “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’ll 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.
In the Fourth Gospel St. John wrote, “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 the word “Logos” for “Word.” Here it’s surer that he meant “speech,” since it’s hard to imagine “reason” becoming flesh in Christ. It was “the living word” that came to dwell in the flesh.
Thus, what Eugen and Franz were “discovering” in 1916 could hardly be older. They were rediscovering something that had become obscured by over two millennia of timeless Platonic philosophizing and Aristotelian metaphysics.
That’s why Franz was justified in his extravagant claim about replacing the methods of all earlier philosophies. That also explains 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.
Speech beyond the Spoken Word
Although Eugen emphasizes the spoken word in his writings, he certainly suggests that all intentional 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.
I picked Paul Klee for that example because I was fortunate enough to become acquainted with his close friend and biographer Will Grohmann. Will was the art critic for Die Neue Zeitung, the US Military Government newspaper published in Berlin after World War II—and I was the paper’s Managing Editor throughout the “Airlift” year of 1948-1949. One evening after he’d had dinner at our house, I told Will that I was writing a book on Eugen’s work—and that I was planning to describe art as a form of speech. In fact, I was going to describe art as one way we listen to the Holy Spirit. What did he think of that?
“Of course,” he replied. “And perhaps you could justify that by printing Klee’s Creative Credo, a note he wrote in 1918. I’ll give you a copy of it tomorrow.”
Klee’s credo runs as follows:
Art does not render the visible, but makes visible….Out of abstract elements of form…will finally be created a formal cosmos which so closely resembles the Creation that a mere breath suffices to bring to life the expression of religious feelings and religion itself….Art plays an unwitting game with the ultimate things and achieves them nevertheless.
Klee helps us recognize that high speech, in all its varied forms, does even more than frame our lives. As I’ve said earlier, such speech does not simply describe reality; it actually creates the human reality. The speech of art does not render what was already visible but makes visible.
To state this again, and quite precisely, as we speak in future, past, inner, and outer directions, we actually create those directions. They were not there before we said so! History exists because we tell it. Without prayer, music, and poetry, there would be no inner self. Without vocatives and prophecy, no future. Without measurement and analysis, no science. In Eugen’s concise formulation: “By speaking we create times and spaces. Language does not describe. It creates a before and after as well as a here and there.”
Sin as the Abuse of Speech
It was also in Berlin that I had a conversation with our paper’s German editor, Lothar Zacek, about Hitler’s incredibly powerful use of speech. I’d shown Lothar some draft chapters of my book on the Cross of Reality—and he objected to an epigraph that I’d placed at the front: “Everybody who speaks believes in God because he speaks.” How could I reconcile that with Hitler, a man whose powers of speech intoxicated most of Germany?
“You’re right,” I replied. “I’ve certainly got to deal with that, and I’ve given it some thought. The answer is that Hitler was not really speaking in his tirades to the German public. Instead, he was ranting; he was abusing speech. Eugen said that speech exists primarily to establish relations with others, to make peace, and to tell the truth. But speech can also be abused, to destroy relations, to make war, and to lie. Everybody who abuses speech, like Hitler, shows our capacity for sin and evil, the power of the devil in us, if you don’t mind an old-fashioned reference.”
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The Cross of Reality and the Cross of Christ
When I recently showed the preceding text to a friend, a long-time student of Eugen’s work, he also had an objection. He questioned whether I should make such efforts to describe the Cross of Reality as a secular image. For him it was an image not only of how the Holy Spirit works in us but also could well be seen as a contemporary image of the Cross of Christ.
Since Eugen’s work has been bedeviled by confusion on this question, I’ll turn to it once more. It’s certainly true that, in The Christian Future, Eugen described the Cross of Reality as a secular translation of the Cross of Christ. That is, we are all crucified, we all have to bear a cross, no matter what our religion—or if we profess no religion.
But the Cross of Reality is not something to which one makes a commitment, as one does to the Cross of Christ. Before one starts to talk about any topic, be it religion, the person, or history, one can turn to the Cross of Reality as a basic model of the human condition. It shows us what faces the animal which speaks. It shows us that this animal acquired language and grammar, that it now understands how to sing and pray and draw pictures. It tells us that we became the human animal when we learned to speak, to hear imperatives to think subjectively, to tell history narratively, and to build homes in the outer world.
Thus, one can use the Cross of Reality to analyze any matter of human concern, as Eugen did when he compared Christianity with the other great religions. He said that Christianity was primarily concerned with the future front, while Israel was more related to our roots in the past. By contrast, we have two “spatial” religions in Buddhism and Taoism. Buddha wanted to save us from strife on the outer front while Lao Tzu told us how to be content with self-effacement on the inner.
In sum, the Cross of Reality is not a uniquely Christian image, nor the Cross of Christ. It is simply an image of the human condition. As we study the orientations on it, and especially the tensions between them, we perceive that this model can be turned into a method able to address any subject of human concern.
A Complex Grammar
I’ve said that poetry can be high speech; now I’ll conclude this chapter with a good example. After Eugen died in 1973, Auden wrote the poem Aubade as a tribute to him. Published in The Atlantic, its last stanza reads:
But Time, the Domain of Deeds,
calls for a complex Grammar
with many Moods and Tenses,
and prime the Imperative.
We are free to choose our paths,
but chose We must, no matter
where they lead, and the tales
we tell of the Past must be true.
Human Time is a City
where each inhabitant has
a political duty
nobody else can perform,
made cogent by her Motto:
LISTEN, MORTALS, LEST YE DIE!
To continue, click: Chapter 4 The Dialogical Method