The French and Russian revolutions are results of the Christian era. They depend upon it, they complete it. —Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
Revolutions do nothing but readjust the equation between heart-power and social order. They come from the open and happen under the open sky. They bring about the Kingdom of God by force, and reach into the infinite in order to reform the finite. —Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
I’ve always agreed with Eugen that Out of Revolution was his most important book, but its 795 pages can seem daunting. Thus, I’ll introduce this chapter, which summarizes Out’s story, with some words from four readers who might convince you that it’s worth the effort.
Harvey Cox was one of the several prominent theologians I’ve encountered while pursuing Eugen’s trail. I first met him in 1964, the year before he woke up the American religious establishment with his book The Secular City. He was the speaker at the annual meeting of the United Church of Christ in Vermont, and his theme was that the great Western revolutions and today’s secular society were the fruit of the Christian era. I approached him after his talk and said it reminded me of Eugen’s book Out of Revolution.
“Yes,” Cox replied. “That’s just where I got the idea.” Continuing on that subject as I drove him to the bus station, I learned about his forthcoming book, and he told me how indebted he was to my professor. He also told me how he’d first heard of Eugen—at a 1961 meeting in Berlin, as I reported in Chapter 2. Since that meeting, Cox said, he’d been reading Eugen’s work quite avidly.
In 1969, a few years after that meeting with Cox, I called on Reinhold Niebuhr. Argo Books was about to republish Out of Revolution, so I went down to Union Theological Seminary in New York and called on the great man. He was still recognized as the dean of American theologians—and I knew he was a longtime admirer of Eugen’s work. My goal was to get a jacket blurb for Out—and he was glad to oblige. We had a good long talk, especially about the difficulties of introducing Eugen to a wider public, difficulties which arose partly because of his wide-ranging thought and partly because he was often assumed to be an idealist, a latter-day Hegelian.
The following statement that Niebuhr later sent to me was one that I put right on the book’s front cover; it certainly suggested that Eugen was more realist than idealist:
Really a remarkable book, full of profound insights into the meaning of modern European history. I have not read a book in a long time which is so imaginative in relating the various economic, religious and political forces at play in modern history, to each other. Ordinary historical interpretations are pale and insipid in comparison with it.
During Argo’s early years, there was a sort of reassembly of the troops from Camp William James. Page Smith, who had gone on to become one of America’s leading historians, was Provost of Cowell College at the University of California Santa Cruz.
Page described Out of Revolution as “the most remarkable book of our time.” His enthusiasm enabled Argo to find many readers for the book on the West Coast. The Whole Earth Bookstore became our biggest customer, partly because of Page and partly because their guru Stewart Brand wrote that Eugen’s book was “personal, passionate, deeply unconventional, and I’m convinced, deeply right.”
Now, with Cox, Niebuhr, Smith, and Brand urging us on, we’re ready to hear what Eugen says in his magnum opus.
Autobiography of Western Man
While Eugen makes only passing reference to the Cross of Reality in Out of Revolution, and only hints that he is using its dialogical method, it’s evident that the new method lay behind everything he wrote in this book. Each of the great Western Revolutions went through four phases. First, there was an imperative calling to remake the future, not only of the revolution’s birthplace but eventually of the whole race. The revolution’s leaders felt called as thou. Second, there was a subjective reply to this calling, during which the new speech of each revolution was first heard and “new persons,” new I’s were born. Third came a narrative or historical phase in which the new persons founded and maintained new institutions, as we. Fourth, and finally, there was an objective phase in which the new imperative, speech, persons, and institutions became commonplace, not only in the nation of their birth but all over the planet. The new persons became they. Of course, that four-phase sequence recapitulates the order of any significant experience, as shown on the Cross of Reality: thou, I, we, and they. And it recapitulates the four basic kinds of speech: imperative, subjective, narrative, and objective.
As I describe the revolutions, I’ll note how each went through those four phases. However, before I do that, I’ll summarize the whole book.
The Clock’s Spring
Out of Revolution tells the history of the West in the past millennium as one continuous story, the story of five closely-related “secular” revolutions, all of which arose in response to what he calls “the Papal Revolution.” When Pope Gregory VII, in 1076, asserted the power of the church over Europe’s kings and emperors, he began the first revolution intended to change the whole world. Until the Papal Revolution, the human story had been told in terms of separate warring tribes and empires. Now, for the first time, there emerged a powerful, unifying planetary institution. The Catholic Church was concerned not only with Europe; it aimed at the conversion and emancipation of the whole human race.
There was an incredible dynamism in that first world revolution. The crusades, the cathedrals, the universities, the beginning of science, all resulted from the creative energy of the High Middle Ages. From the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries, for almost half of this past millennium, the Vicar of Christ presided over a rapidly-expanding Christendom. This was the beginning of what we now call “world history.”
I’ve found it helpful to encapsulate Eugen’s perspective on this past millennium in the image of a clock’s spring. We can think of the Papal Revolution as if it were the winding up of this spring, drawing on all the energy of Christianity’s first millennium. This winding motion, this storage of energy, created a powerful church which dominated the West and had begun to dominate the world. But when the clock’s spring had been fully wound, the Reformation reversed its motion, and the energy that had been stored was released in the form of five great secular revolutions. All five were planetary in their ambitions; all were replies to the Papal Revolution and retained its messianic impulses. Even though they had secular goals, they came to life within the orbit of Christianity and served the larger purposes of Christianity.
What were those five? First came the Reformation of 1517, which Eugen called “the German Revolution.” Next came the British Parliamentary Revolution of 1649; then two “twin revolutions,” the American of 1776 and the French of 1789; finally, the Russian Revolution of 1917. The achievements of each left unfinished business, leading on to the next. The progressive achievements of these revolutions tell not only a story of the human spirit but also a story of how the Holy Spirit acts in history. Of course, I mean the Holy Spirit in the sense that I’ve presented it in the preceding chapters: as our gift of speech, more specifically as our gift of that high speech which calls us to a new future.
With the preceding in mind, we’re ready now to consider the accomplishments of each great revolution. I’ll end my summary of each with a quote from Out which catches Eugen’s lively—and decidedly non-academic—way of expressing some aspect of that revolution’s achievement.
The Papal Revolution (1076)
Of course, we’ll begin with Pope Gregory VII. Instead of having to storm a Bastille, he managed to start the papal revolution simply by sitting in his study and writing Dictatus Papae, a document that asserted his dominion over all the royalty of Europe.
His revolution’s imperative was to realize the kingdom of God on earth by emancipating all humankind. It sought to establish Christendom not only over kings and emperors but over the whole planet. The church would become our first transnational institution.
This revolution’s new speech, on the one hand, was the argumentation of theology, which organized the various sciences and made itself their queen. On the other hand, it was prayer, via plainchant and ever more elaborate worship. The new persons created by this speech were the crusaders, the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the members of the craft guilds, the university professors; and eventually those who discovered that we lived on a globe: the captains of the sailing ships in the age of exploration.
The Papal Revolution’s new institutions, of course, were those in which its new persons worked: religious orders, universities, and guilds.
Finally, its planetary result, achieved over a period of four hundred years, was the successful establishment of Christendom, not only in Western Europe but in outposts all over the planet.
In retrospect, we can see how this revolution’s messianic ambitions had an orientation toward the future.
Eugen describes the universality of this revolution as follows:
The Papal Revolution, by asking the Roman monarch to give back his right of investiture to the universal church of Peter and Paul, expressed the idea of a new sovereign co-existing with every king and emperor in every parish....The idea of a trans-local organization, a corporation was realized. The Catholic Church is not at all international. It would be bad taste to call her so.
The German Reformation (1517)
After many years of planetary progress, by the 16th century Gregory’s dictatorship of the Pope was no longer a great source for renewal. The excessive power of the church had led, in the end, to the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition and the selling of indulgences, that form of “salvation for pay” which so enraged Martin Luther.
The German Reformation of 1517, led by that good monk, had the imperative goal of bringing Christianity to renewed life in the secular world, making the individual believer free from the dictates of Rome. Its goal was freedom of conscience.
In terms of the Cross of Reality, its orientation was subjective, emphasizing precisely our inner conscience.
Its resulting new speech was secular literature, music and art, plus the Bible— translated into the vernacular and available in every home. Before the Reformation almost all high art, in every civilization, had a religious character. Of course, science too was freed from church authority—and began to experiment.
The German writers of the Reformation hymns and the composers of oratorios and symphonies, from Bach to Beethoven, were among the creators of this revolution’s new speech. Its new persons included such musicians, artists, civil servants, public school teachers, scientists, and academics. Equally important were the conscientious laymen, who served as secular priests and felt equal to their pastors.
These new persons administered the Reformation’s new institutions, including public schools, the civil service, and academies.
The planet-wide achievements of this revolution have included the universal acceptance of public education and scientific investigation. They’ve also included the inevitable bureaucracies which support a secular civil society.
In Out, Eugen speaks of civil servants:
To understand the real inner justification for the strict discipline of a civil service, we must turn to the German revolution; for it alone gave the civil servant a religious position in his country. In the German revolution the drab, grey life of the average bureaucrat was suddenly transformed, as if by a great volcanic eruption. Graft, bribery, the spoils-system, stain the character of the civil servant in every country which has not been touched by this great revolution.
The British Parliamentary Revolution (1649-1688)
While the Reformation had established a secular civil society, in Germany and beyond, during its first century that society was still ruled by kings and princes. It remained for Oliver Cromwell to lead the English Parliamentary Revolution of 16491688, which toppled first King Charles I and then King James II.
Cromwell’s Puritans had the imperative goal of freeing the civil society from the dictates of kings and princes—and to free or “purify” the church from lingering royal and Catholic influence. In brief, its imperative was political freedom.
This revolution’s resulting new speech was that of law, debate, and argument. Such was the speech of its new persons: aristocratic gentlemen, lawyers, and parliamentarians.
Its corresponding new institutions, of course, were parliaments and courts.
With its emphasis on law and tradition, its cross orientation was toward the past.
On the scale of the planet, its results were parliamentary democracies, the rule of law state, and reliable legal systems.
Eugen describes the new speech of this revolution as follows:
The word “Common,” which appears in the phrases Common Prayer, House of Commons, common sense, reached its climax in the enthronement of “Commonwealth.” The word communicates the thrill of pride over the fact that Church and State were now united into a Commonwealth, whilst formerly the Chancellor had to alternate, so to speak, between the two.
The French Revolution (1789)
Despite its rule of law, after 1688 England remained a society ruled by aristocrats. The landed gentry and the Lords remained decidedly more important than the lowly man in the street. And the continent still had its kings. It remained for Voltaire and Rousseau, as theorists, and then Robespierre as executioner, to launch the French Revolution which would elevate that bourgeois citizen to power.
This revolution had the famed imperatives of liberté, egalité, fraternité. It sought freedom not only from the power of the church (be it Catholic or Protestant), and from kings, but also from preening aristocrats. Now the bourgeois entrepreneur would be king and Reason would be enthroned with him.
Its new speech was expressed in a flowering of national literatures and arts, plus journalism. And its new persons, besides the entrepreneur, were novelists, newspapermen, and increasingly objective and experimental scientists.
These new types held forth in such new institutions as corporations, independent newspapers, and institutes of technology.
Finally, the French revolution’s planetary results include capitalism, competitive markets, free enterprise, and a free press.
By comparison with its predecessors, this revolution was focused on life’s outer front—where rationalism and objectivity are dominant.
Eugen celebrates the French Revolution in these words:
Once in a long while it happens that a great question is brought up and discussed and fought through once for all. The equal right of every human being is a fruit of the French Revolution which was conquered once for all for Moujiks and Jews, blacks and yellows, men and women.
The American Revolution (1776)
This brings us to the American Revolution. In Eugen’s view, this revolution’s imperatives were drawn from both the English and the French revolutions. Though it preceded the French by 13 years, it was inspired by the same anti-royalist and egalitarian sentiments, ones that were being widely-expressed, on both sides of the Atlantic, by the 1770s. Eugen saw the Americans as successfully combining the Christian-inspired achievements of the English Revolution with the anti-Christian Enlightenment’s achievements, as codified by the French.
Thus, the American Revolution’s new speech and persons are already noted in the preceding descriptions of the French and English revolutions.
In terms of the Cross of Reality, it combined French rationalist and objective enlightenment with British respect for past tradition.
This synthesizing role of the American Revolution has turned its ongoing life into a primary source of what Eugen called the “Planetary Revolution” (which will be described below).
To capture the dream of the American Revolution, Eugen pointed to the word “united” in United States:
The new unity was a unity not in being but in becoming. It was not a togetherness of possessions but the potentiality of an unfolding, ever widening system. As Thomas Paine shouted: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again…” He was much less interested in the constitution of 1776 or 1787 than in the concept of a world in space and time, destined “to begin all over again.”
The Russian Revolution (1917)
The 19th century’s new speech and institutions, born of the French and American Revolutions, indeed led to a “century of progress.” But its industrial revolution, led by the new bourgeois entrepreneurs, also saw dreadful exploitation of labor. Not only men but children and women were treated with utter inhumanity. In response, socialism, and later communism, expressed a new imperative, one which came to be embodied, however imperfectly, in the Russian Revolution of 1917. That imperative was freedom from economic exploitation. “Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!”
Its new kind of speech was quantitative: economic statistics, minimum wages, value added by labor, and gross national products. The related new person, the new I, was the proletarian worker, who replied to the new imperative by marching with red and yellow banners in Leningrad—or joining the auto workers union in Detroit.
In the USSR, and many other countries, its new institution was a dictatorship, nominally of the proletariat, but actually of a Communist Party elite. In Western democracies, its new institutions were government agencies, which sought to control national economies and prevent exploitation of labor.
The Russian Revolution's direct result was the emergence of a great industrialized nation in a formerly backward land. Eighty percent of Russians were illiterate in 1890! Indirectly, its world-wide result, when expressed as social democracy, managed to tame the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism in both Europe and the United States. The US New Deal, with Social Security, the CCC, and all those other alphabet agencies, would never have come into existence without the field of force created by the Russian Revolution.
One can see this revolution as recapturing the Papal Revolution’s messianic belief in our glorious future. At the same time, it spoke the French Revolution’s new rationalist and objective language.
Eugen describes the new speech of this revolution as follows:
A Bolshevik dictionary might contain: Quantity: The Masses. Quality: The Bolshevik Party. Society: …Class situation is explained in figures and statistics. Changes in human history become visible in statistical changes, as in the key of distribution. This is provoking language.
That completes my summary of what each revolution achieved. Early in Out Eugen makes a statement that helps us see how the negative sides of all those revolutions were related to their positive achievements:
All great revolutions re-create public law, public order, public spirit and public opinion; they all reform private manners and private feelings. They themselves must therefore live in a third dimension, beyond the reach of public law and private conviction. They live in the unprotected, unexplored and unorganized space which is hated by every civilization like hellfire itself—and which probably lies near hellfire. But it lies near heaven too. Heaven and hell are the only words left to us for this character of openness and immediacy.
The Planetary Revolution (1945 forward)
After the Second World War, Eugen had more to say about the great revolutions. In The Christian Future, he wrote that we would continue, for centuries, to live in their fields of force. He saw the two World Wars as a final revolution, a planetary revolution, in which the thousand-year period of Christendom had come to an end. The positive aspect of this Planetary Revolution, however, was that it drew together the separate strands of the revolutions which had formed Western man—including the Russian Revolution. And from these strands it was weaving the new material of the global society, a “Great Society,” which would now emerge on the face of the planet. As he expressed it:
The two world wars were the form of world revolution in which this new future reached into everybody’s life; the nationalist and communist ideologies with their dreams of revolution were checkmated and are mere foam around the real transformation. The real transformation was made by the wars and it made the Great Society final. She is the heiress of State and Church.
If we admit that the world wars were the negative side of today’s planetary revolution, and that this revolution’s positive side is its role as heir of all the others, we can go on to describe its imperatives. It will certainly be enough, in the first centuries of the third millennium, to work toward the emancipation of all humankind by achieving freedom of conscience, political freedom, freedom of individual enterprise, and freedom from economic exploitation.
Eugen vs. the Idealists
When Out of Revolution was published in 1938, one of its prominent reviewers was Yale professor Crane Brinton, who himself had just written a book on the great revolutions. In his review, Brinton suggested that Eugen belonged in the tradition of German idealism. I hope that my preceding summary of Out has shown why this is not the case.
Even my friend Bill Coffin, Yale’s activist chaplain, found Eugen sounded to him like an idealist. That’s what he told our mutual friend Rabbi Marshall Meyer—when Marshall invited him to listen to some tapes of Eugen’s lectures.
How has my preceding summary of Out shown that Eugen should not be confused with his idealist opponents? German idealism, as it came to a head in Hegel, imagines that there is a transcendental reality, which he called “Absolute Spirit” or “World Spirit.” This Spirit is gradually advancing and revealing itself throughout history, inspiring this drab world here below. That’s not the story told in Out. Here we learn about a human spirit which moves through and in us, not above and beyond us. Eugen’s presentation is rooted in the down-to-earth events, persons, freedoms, and institutions which we know at first hand. If God is present in this history, as Eugen believed he is, then he must be what Bonhoeffer imagined: “a suffering God.”
The Spirit and the Revolutions in 2007
I’ve said that Out of Revolution shows us how the Holy Spirit, as future-creating imperative speech, is at work in history. When we look back at the great, all-embracing revolutions of the past millennium, we can, indeed, see that they were revolutions of the spirit. In New Testament language, they envisioned “a new heaven and a new earth.” In John Winthrop’s language, they sought to erect a “City upon a hill.” In Lincoln’s language, they opened us up to “man’s vast future.”
I think that Out is convincing because it appeals to our own memory, even our own experience, of the events it describes. The Enlightenment and the Russian Revolution are still swirling through our lives today. The Reformation’s initial separation of Church and State, expanded and confirmed by the British, French, and American revolutions, is newly-threatened in the US of 2007. I’ll leave to this book’s Part III a discussion of how we need to respond to that threat, as represented by the forces of religious fundamentalism.
The Spirit and the Third Millennium
One of Eugen’s students, the legal scholar Harold Berman has written a widely-acclaimed book, Law and Revolution, in which he describes how the western legal tradition has been formed by the great revolutions. Hal, of course, credits Eugen as his source for this idea. Elsewhere Hal has written about the Holy Spirit as “the God of History.” I’ll quote below from his article, since reading it reinforced my own conviction that we can speak of the Holy Spirit at work in history:
The historical challenge of the third millennium of the Christian era, Rosenstock-Huessy taught, is to create out of the many peoples of the world a single community; and in seeking to accomplish that goal, the emphasis of the Christian faith must be on the third person of the triune God, the Holy Spirit, who prophesies unity and, taking many forms, inspires people of diverse belief systems and loyalties to listen to each other, to learn each other’s languages, and to overcome their mutual hostilities.
In Rosenstock-Huessy’s words: ‘The story of salvation on earth is the advance of the singular against the plural. Salvation came into a world of many gods, many lands, many peoples. Over against these it sets up a singular: one God, one world, one humankind.’
Christianity not a Religion
To sum up this chapter, when we recognize that all the peoples of this planet live today in the fields of force created by the Papal Revolution and its successors, we realize that Christianity is much more than a religion. It has been the motor for most of the progress, in every portion of the globe, throughout a millennium. In the first half of the millennium, it used religious language; however, since the Reformation, it has increasingly expressed itself in secular terms.
That explains why Eugen declared that “Christianity is not a religion.” By “religion” he meant that kind of closed cult which claims to offer unique advantages to its devotees and often disparages the religions of others. He also meant a system of belief which concentrates on its origins in the past—and thus tends to resist change. Christianity, by contrast, when seen in the light of its total revolutionary history, has been absolutely focused on bringing about change. It’s been engaged in constant renewal, with opening us up to each other, with freeing all the captives—from the powers of kings and emperors, popes, nobles, aristocrats, and finally, in just the last century, from robber-baron capitalists. Thus, Christianity’s impact on society in the last millennium was vastly more important beyond the church than within it.
Far from being other-worldly, Christianity created today’s one world, our global society. A dramatic example is China. As Eugen put it, “The China after 1911 is a part of the Christian era....If you have a son of Heaven in Peking, that meant that they had a special heaven, a special world.” The Christian Sun Yat-Sen led the 1911 revolution that ended the son of Heaven’s empire (and prepared for Mao’s importation of the Russian revolution). It was actually a Congregationalist minister who baptized Sun, using the baptismal name Rixin, meaning “daily renewal.”
A Messenger for Out
As the reader has seen by now, I’ve been busy reading, printing, promoting, and distributing Out for over sixty years. Now the next chapter will travel back in time to the first decade of those years, when I packed two copies of the book into my bag as I got ready to go to Paris early in 1948.
To continue, click: Chapter 6 God is Like a Whole Humanity