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(Eric Hutchison: Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to welcome you, one and all, to this meeting of the Forum tonight. And I'd like to address a special word of welcome to our friends from outside the seminary community.

(We have a rare privilege this week in having in our midst in Union one of the remarkable figures of our time, Prof. Rosenstock-Huessy. Prof. RosenstockHuessy is at once a scholar and a man of action. He is a scholar who has been constantly immersed in practical affairs. And he is a man of action who, throughout a life of service in many causes, has maintained a rigorous discipline of study, which has given him commanding authority in a wide range of fields. Yet at the same time, and characteristically enough, he has been constantly fighting the domination of the academic approach to life.

(He was appointed a lecturer in law at Leipzig University in 1912 at the early age of 24, but was soon called away to active service in the First World War. As for many others before and since, this experience wrought a spiritual revolution in his own life and gave him a new insight into the weaknesses of our civilization and a new vision of the power of the Christian faith and the commands that it lays upon us. So it was that after the war, when he was offered three tempting opportunities for responsible work in the fields of politics, of religion, and of scholarship, he turned his back on all of them. To commit himself to one would have been to satisfy a part of himself, but would have been to betray the larger vision which had come to him. And so he turned instead and took a job in an automobile factory, and edited a weekly journal on labor affairs.

(From this developed his own passionate belief in labor camps as a means of restoring unity to life. And he worked in a number of specific projects in Germany to bring this as a reality into the life of the German people. In 1923, he was appointed professor of the history of law and sociology at Breslau University, a post which he held until he was forced to leave the country in 1933, when he came to this country, first to Harvard University and then to Dartmouth College, where he has been a professor since 1935.

(These perhaps somewhat external facts are but a preliminary to meeting the man himself, but perhaps they may help to see a part of the background of his thinking. But if I've been somewhat hesitant to speak of this, I feel even more hesitant to speak of his thought, and just say a word: that -- that he's provocative is certain. But that this is good is also certain.

(He has told us in an article he wrote on liturgical thinking that he has carried

through a revolution in his own thinking. A revolution which, I'm certain, puts him in strong opposition to much that we take for granted. He can open for us new and exciting perspectives, which I think we ignore at our peril and at the peril of those who come after us. This afternoon in a small meeting which some of us had with him, he claimed to be a champion of orthodoxy. And he is one of the most unconventional thinkers today, precisely, I believe, because he has seen the startling challenge of orthodoxy more clearly than many. And he will no doubt reveal to us the dull conventionality of much that we might call heresy.

(Tonight we're trying an experiment in the Forum. Instead of inviting another speaker to debate with Prof. Rosenstock-Huessy, we invite you. Each and every one of you will be the person with whom he is debating, and I hope he'll provoke you considerably. And I hope you will challenge him vigorously. I'm sure that's what he would like. And without further ado, I would present to you Dr. Rosenstock-Huessy, who will speak to us on "Before and After Karl Marx, Prophecies Fulfilled and Unfulfilled." Thank you.)

I don't know what I like. I would like to have finished. It is very difficult nowadays to meet other people's minds. And I'm always reminded of the -- when I try to speak to men with -- involved in departmentalized thinking of today, of the weatherman of this great city of New York. The other day he was interviewed about the smedge or sm- -- how do you call this? There's a special word for it -- and he said, "Oh, if I only could get the weather into a laboratory, and test it there and experiment with it. But here, what do I have got -- what have I got? I have these vast masses of air moving by themselves, guided by nobody but themselves."

That I thought was wonderful, "guided by nobody but themselves." Now it seems to me that this is the perfect simile of humanity at this moment -- tremendous masses of hot air moving by themselves and guided by nobody but themselves. I think the "but themselves" is really the climax. Not only "guided by nobody," but even making this vain attempt of -- of being guided by themselves. Is this true, then it is no use talking about before and after, because obviously, then every time is just a mass of hot air, trying to move, guided by itself. And sometimes you get the impression. And in order to create this impression, we have surrounded ourselves by newspapers, and radio, and the other mass media, and they certainly are only guided by nothing but themselves.

I have however felt -- I have never talked on Karl Marx before in my life. I had no reason. Now I feel that perhaps he may help us by placing him -- to get out of this terrible idea that we are just hot air, and that we are just moving by ourselves, each time, each day, each year, each generation lost to its own myth. Because obviously this air is exactly what the parallel people in the social

sciences and the humanities have condescended now to recognize as being in existence. Hot air, and they call this myth. It's not a long time that an illustrious member of this faculty wrote a book on the mythology of Christianity as compared with the theology of Marxism. Isn't Christianity also such a hot air, guided by nothing but itself? Or -- certainly we cannot put ourselves into a laboratory and experiment with ourselves. The American people tried this in the First World War to treat the war as just an experiment, with which they had in a laboratory and which they could give up, because it didn't work. But the Second World War has shown us that this isn't possible. War is very serious. You cannot experiment with war, and -- just as little as you can experiment with -- with children or with housewives. You can divorce them, but you cannot experiment with them.

And -- our forefathers believed that we were God's experiment. And He has, I think, furnished us certain means of feeling that we are not guided by ourselves, and not hot air, and not myth. And that Christianity came into this world -- and Judaism -- to make it possible for men to emerge from their mythology; that the dissolution, the dilution, the diastasis, the -- that the catalyst of mythology is a faith which is patient enough even to give up one's own day and time and its mythology by connecting the times. And that's why I have called this -- these two lectures, "Before and After Marx." I shall simply try to introduce you into the situation as it in- - existed before Marx or in the days when Marx arose in 1847 and after Marx, as we see it today, 30 years after the so-called "10 days that shook the world" allegedly and didn't.

Before and after Marx -- that points out that perhaps we have here in the last century a secular analogy to the great pretense of revelation that only this was revealed truth. Only this was valid truth, which could come back, generation after generation, as the same truth, although the people in every generation first looked at it and dealt with it, in the language of their own day. If Marx perhaps could be a prophet, then we would look back into our own story and say we have heard of prophets. They seem to be a necessity for the fulfillment. There seems to be certainly just hot air if people try to reap where they haven't sown. And they are certainly just one's own mythology when every generation and every day has its own invention, and its own art, and its own science, and its own psychoanalysis.

But if the parents and the children and the grandchildren -- if generations after generations of Heaven and earth from the first day of -- since -- when God began to create this universe, there has been a necessity that these people should all march with diversified roles, but battle the same enemy of death, the same enemy of destruction, then perhaps the last century offers a reintroduction into directed and interpretable history of the human race.

So Marx has been called a prophet and he knew he was one and he certainly was one if ever there was a prophet -- a prophet of doom. And that reminds us of the fact that Christianity could have never come into this world if it hadn't been the fulfillment of a promise. Just as little as the Jews could have gotten into the promised land if it had- -- they hadn't been outside for a long time. So that more than one generation is -- are -- is needed before we can speak of truth. And the victory over my own myths is actually required before I can say that I participate in the life of the spirit.

And the fashionable thing certainly is a thing to combat, or to overcome, at least, or to reconcile with the non-fashionable.

And it also brings up this question if we cannot learn to distinguish these various phases with great precision which come between prophecy and fulfillment. We say simply today "prophecy" and "fulfillment," but I think for the last 1900 years, we know a little more about these phases. They are not just two phases. One says this is going to happen and then it happens, as this nice relation between the Old Testament and the New Testament seems to say. As you know, Jesus was not recognized by the Jews. And so the fulfillment wasn't just the fulfillment of the promise.

There are -- seems to be four stages or -- to be disentangled. And again in the Marxian story, we may be able even to identify these phases. There is the prophecy. There is the coming. There is the defeat. And then there is the Gospel. Or to put it in the Christian language, there is John the Baptist. And there is Jesus. And there are the Apostles. And then there are the four Gospels written. The story is -- can be told. But it cannot be told except in the Apostolic age and even after the Apostles, partly at least, have died, let alone the Lord.

So the fulfillment is very different from the prophecy, and if fulfillment and prophecy were just as simple as people who today live -- try to live in antiquity always seem to take it -- all the Biblical criticists and the people who judge the church history from the outside, the -- then it would of course be that the promise is already known -- that the fulfillment is known by the promise. Then we would ch- -- simply because something is prophesied, then already would know how the fulfillment must come about. That of course isn't true. The fulfillment always looks so that the people who have prophesied it hate it, and just don't like the fulfillment. But it is fulfillment just the same. And that's very interesting that the prophets and the Apostles are the trans- -- are transformed one into the other. As you know, the Church puts in the -- in the sculpture of the cathedrals the Apostles of the new order, in the place of the prophets of the old order, because the Apostles came after the fulfillment, but before the fulfillment is recognized, before the Gospel story is written, before Matthew, and Luke and

John and Mark exist as Gospels so that we can then have this nice pastime of preaching on it.

It's a very painful story divided into four chapters -- prophecy, fulfillment, apostolicity, allegiance to this fulfillment, despite the defeat of a worldly character. And then only the meeting of the {world} demands to be introduced in through the secret and to recognize what has happened. Four phases.

I think that the 19th century was faced with the fact that myth of one age, the newspaper news, or the progress of science and the eternal truth were completely mixed and confounded, and thought to be the same thing. Philosophy and revelation were just one and the same thing. Well, you said, "Well, revelation, we don't need this. We have theology." Well, theology is -- is certainly not revelation. And it has nothing to do with historical incarnation. Theology is about incarnation, but it isn't itself any process of incarnating the spirit into the world. But prophecy is. Apostolicity is. And the Gospels are. And so when this terrible mistake of the philosophers, of the French Enlightenment, of the German idealism occurred, it is no wonder that four evangelists appeared whom we may very well compare to the four evangelists of the Gospel. I don't know if this means that the order of things has been reversed throughout in the 19th century, perverted so that the evangelists came last in the process of the incarnation, and in our case in the 19th century, the "disangelists," as we may call them, the prophets of doom, came first. That would mean that after the -- disangelists, the Apostles would come and the catastrophe, the crucifixion of the human race in the two world wars, and now we may write the story as prophecy fulfilled.

It seems to me a little bit like that because there have been four -- not Gospel writers, but devil writers or disangelists, as I like to call them, and one of them is Karl Marx. But before we specialize on Karl Marx, I think it is necessary for you and me -- if we use this word "prophecy" with any meaning, and with any power, and without any vagueness, but with real precision -- that we should see that Marx doesn't stand alone. When he was buried, Friedrich Engels, his comrade in arms, the great refuter of Marxism because of his indispensable friendship and love for Marx and his family, something utterly unpredic- -- unpredicted and unforeseen in the annals of Marxism, this relation of Friedrich Engels and Marx, a very human story. He said at the grave that Marx had done for society what Darwin had done for nature. So we have every right to feel that Marx himself felt that he was a brother in arms with Charles Darwin.

We have here two disangelists. And there are two more, obviously; one is -- the third is Nietzsche and the fourth is Freud. What have these four disangelists to proclaim? They have something to proclaim. They have to proclaim the dissolution of history, the end not of history, but the fact that there is no history, but

that everything has to go in reverse. The children have to be emancipated of their parents; otherwise they can't live. Therefore they cannot inherit the -- the inheritance from their parents. There is nothing to build upon, the Oedipus complex has to be eliminated.

Marx is a case which I shall look into, after I have spoken of Darwin. Darwin certainly has eliminated the victory of the we- -- weak. Now the story of mankind obviously is this tremendous miracle that whenever the armored cars and the tanks and the sauriae and the elephants and the mammoths come to the end of their wits, that it is the weak child which starts a new generation, that frailty is the only way of conquering the future. And -- but Charles Darwin said "No. Survival of the fittest." And the fittest the -- the most brutal one -- dog eats dog. The -- the -- the ridiculous character of the evolution theory is in this: that he didn't see that the nature leads always into blind alleys and that the creative act begins with the -- with giving up the -- of the form that is achieved and going into a greater plasticity and a greater frailty or a greater weakness and not in a greater -- into a greater strength.

We live here as human beings on this earth at this moment only because we are so foolish that we can reorganize in every generation totally, because we know nothing for a longer time. All the beings in nature are the same for thousands of years, and this would be too boring for us. And we would be so strong that we would die from our own strength, from our equipment.

So history there is reduced to the past -- that -- the human story, which -- consists in this complete reversal of all the values in this revaluation of weakness and strength, is denied. In Marx, as you know, history is divided into promise and fulfillment in such a manner that they have nothing to do with each other -- that nobody is blessed and can go to Heaven in the time of class wars. And in the classless society, there is no longer an incentive to be wicked.

This complete split of history again is the abolition of history. As you know, Paul Tillich has very often stated very clearly that a de-demonized history would no longer be history and that it is quite arbitrary, this Utopia in which no longer it is necessary to fight or to have any struggle or to have any split, to be overcome or to be reconciled.

So we have in Marx this strange separation of war and peace outside each other. The whole history so far has been a history of class wars, of endless class wars and the end will be without class wars and therefore without history. Of Nietzsche, it is more difficult to speak for me, because I certainly have been educated by Nietzsche, more than by the three other men. This disangelist is already, as you may know, just as Marx too in his -- has attempted to reach the

land beyond the catastrophe. And he has not painted this new land as a Utopia, as a classless society of Marx. What he has discovered is, I think, half-and-half truth, as with the three other disangelists, too. He has discovered that there is nothing true, beautiful and good in this world -- that -- which you can read in Shakespeare's "Hamlet," already -- that only our thinking makes it so. And that we -- our values themselves change. And that our forebears may perhaps lead us, but certainly not our concepts or our ideas. He has destroyed humanism.

The history of humanism, the idea that we were the neo-Greeks, that the Renaissance, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans, or the {materi-} -- it doesn't matter -- that the Greeks were to be lived by Pierpont Morgan in the Morgan Library a second time. If you go into the Morgan Library, you will see that the story there begins with Cosimo de Medici and Cesare Borgia and then it ends with all the -- with all the incunabula, with all the great prints of the classics of the 15th century, and the beginning of the 16th century. And it was a great time of 400 years' length in which we thought that humanism had to be revived.

Nietzsche, but Marx and Darwin and Freud as well, have destroyed the Greek -- Greek myth of our own time, of our own last centuries. And they have forced the theologians and the Christians, as far as they still think they should be this, to separate the cross and its Greek environment. After 1859, after The Origin of Species, and after the Communist Manifest of 1857, and after Freud had found the Oedipus Complex in the '80s, and after Nietzsche has -- had said, "Thus Spake Zarathustra," it is impossible to believe that you can get away with the sermons as they they were were preached over the last hundred years in which there was no difference between the Good and the True and the Beautiful on the one-hand side, the ideals of Plato; and faith, love and hope of Christianity on the other. And I still should -- shall see the congregation that does know the difference.

They think it's all so beautiful and so true and so good, you see, that it makes no difference. However, faith, love and hope have to be -- guide us when we don't know what is good, when we don't know what is beautiful, and we don't know what is true. And we don't know, either, any one of the three, because the ideals don't speak, but God does.

But these Greek ideals therefore had to be destroyed by these disangelists and I think they have rendered us a tremendous service by attacking officially Christianity and the history of the human race and by -- in fact only being able to disentangle the plaster cast around Christianity called humanism, or liberalism, or capitalism, or whatever they call it. All the -isms. No -isms around the Cross.

But these four disangelists of course, they work -- did their work between 1847

and 1889. You may say that this was the time in which God died in humanity, in the -- His old form of a Greek philosopher, and of a theologian, and of -- of a thinker, or of a rationalist, or of a mind, or of an idealist. Still in this country 90 percent of the Christians think that Christianity is idealism. It certainly isn't. It's -- came into the world against idealism, because idealism is a myth. And I -- I think we -- really these four men have -- at a time when the preachers and the theologians were not able to -- to render this service, have freed us from the equation of Greece and Golgotha.

How did they do it? The -- Darwin, Marx, prophets of doom, prophets of brutality, prophets of ugliness, prophets of sickness -- Freud the same way, or Nietzsche. Insanity, even. On the other hand, the Church is convinced that everything was in the best of -- we lived in the best of worlds, and progress was guaranteed. It was not -- only in 1893 that the first theologian woke up to the fact that perhaps a man called Nietzsche had gone insane for good reason, reminding the people that there could be a judgment day, there could be a doom, there could be the great catastrophe of the Western world which he proclaimed in 189- -- -89, then went into his subconscious for 11 years, then died. And then after 14 years, this cataclysm began which is just now in its last travails.

We are behind the times as Christians. Very much so. And we have -- can only gain time again and gain access to the powers that rule the world by -- and influence them, and become one of them ourselves -- by admitting that the childrens of darkness -- children of darkness certainly saw much more clearly in the night than we did. We had too much sunshine.

As you know, these prophets of doom all became sectarians. Nietzsche declared that he didn't want to have anything to do with the -- of -- academic profession. Marx, who said he didn't want to have anything to do with the bourgeois society. Freud certainly was an outcast of the medical profession. And only Darwin got his own clan behind him. These four men struck. Charles Darwin certainly forwent the blessings of the Church, which in England in 1859 still mattered. Karl Marx was an exile in London, as you know. He forwent his safety, his happiness throughout his life. Without his great wife, he certainly would not have survived the ordeal of being chased out of Germany, out of Belgium, and out of France. Nietzsche went insane.

The price then of these disangelists was an existential sacrifice. And I think the thing we have to learn from these men, first of all, is that the truth in its own time cannot be proclaimed with any power if the man who proclaims it is not quite indifferent to his own time. Indifference to one's own time is the condition certainly of entering the kingdom of Heaven.

I have a very dear friend. He is an historian. The Ford Foundation was founded; he immediately gathered 24 colleagues at Harvard University -- all historians, to devolve a problem -- a program which would convince the Ford Foundation that they had to support these 25 important people for the next three years. I asked him what they would propose. He -- they said they would propose exactly that for which the Ford Foundation would be ready to give them money. And they even talked about it. They told me. This man told me, his teacher, such an affront, such an impudence, such a shamelessness.

It's done every ti- -- day in Eur- -- in America and Europe at this moment. If you have research to do, anything goes. Research is just another way now of the PWA. It is shameful, gentlemen, and you see that these prophets of doom, these disangelists, at least have one benefit. I don't believe in their truth, but I believe in their way of life. I believe that they were decent people and I believe that our modern scientists are all corrupt for money.

I want to see a man who cannot be corrupted by money, before I believe him. I know people in cancer research who have thought differently because they could only the -- get the grant on one theory and not on the other.

This is the greatest lesson, I think. It has happened outside the Church. It is a Christian lesson. It is a story of real prophecy, becoming effective all the more because these people were out of tune with their own time.

But now to introduce you into the beauty of that time when these disangelists arose and we just didn't know yet that we would have to give up humanism and these nice ideals of the True and the Good and the Beautiful; that truth, and beauty, and goodness was the by-product of sacrifice, and love, and hope. But we didn't begin with these ideals. And we couldn't see them, because God remains invisible and you cannot face Him. To -- we these people who want to visualize the ideals are certainly just idolaters and pagans. Any attempt to have the beat- -- the vis- -- beatic -- beatific vision, whether it's a -- clothed in the terms of the mystic in the Middle Ages or in the terms of the idealist in modern times is forbidden.

Now in 1847, all this was very obscure. When the manifest of the -- Communism was printed, there was a great unity still between the classes, the nations, between the denominations. I must remind you that at that moment we had here in this country the Millerites, the last great eschatological movement -- in Vermont. It started, as you know -- may know, in Putney in 1842. They expected the coming of the Lord right away. You had the Oneida Socialists. That is, a socialism which was completely compatible with every other way of life and society, and Socialism not -- was not a sectarian belief. These socie- -- Oneida

Socialists have flourished in this country as some of you may know, for some decades very successfully. There have been any number of other similar experiments, all started at the end of the '30s and the beginning of the '40s of the 19th century. And I try to bring back to you for this moment, for the end of today, this time before Marxens decision to pay the penalty of striking out against existing society by withholding any allegiance, any loyalty, any support of it. And that is the same as -- as I think, in the case of Nietzsche and in the case of Freud that this striking power, this going outside, this forming a picketing -- picket line, so to speak, outside the existing workshop of mankind, is the reason why we still mention these people and have forgotten the optimists of the '40s.

But at this moment, I invite you to look into the story of, for example, men like Kingsley, and Carlyle, and Ruskin -- these Christian socialists who surrounded Marx and Darwin in their beginnings. They have done a very excellent job. They tried to harmonize the most contradictory things and they believed it could be done.

I here have a letter written by one of the leading socialists to Karl Marx, and putting very clearly the issue of harmony and war in terms, and laying down the law that he would not become a Marxist, a Marxian, for this very reason. And I think when we -- you read this letter, it will not be difficult for you to discover that for hundred years now, if you think now of Mr. Malenkov even, and the Third International, and the Comintern, not much has changed, that we are still moving -- in this same century, or the same situation of an either -- seeming either-or between the people who forego the benefits of being contemporaries of their society and the people who cannot forego this benefit. Obviously this is -- since this is before -- Marx, before the Cold War, before the two world wars, before the rise of the great contrast between a Western half of Christianity and an Eastern half of Christianity -- because that's what it is -- obviously, we will have to come to the certain conclusion at this moment, if we shall feel really free to speak of a pe- -- our period as really being after Marx. If we just remain, as Mr. Proudhon, in the situation of not understanding Marx simply, then we -- I certainly would have no right to speak tomorrow night of prophecies fulfilled and of the fact that we really have a right perhaps -- perhaps to say, partly at least, that we live after Marx and his disangel -- disgospel, or however you like to call it. As -- I also feel that we have a right to say that we live after Darwin, and live after Nietzsche, and live after Freud. But that is, of course, an invitation. And everyone of you must find out -- himself whether he is before Marx, or a Marxian, or after Marx -- or whether he is a pre-Freudian, or a Freudian, or a postFreudian.

And so, this is up to you. I don't -- cannot psychoanalyze you, because I don't believe in it. But every one of you knows that in part he is living in 1847; and in

part he is living in 1890; and in part perhaps he may try to live in 1957, not to speak of 1984.

Give me five minutes to read this document, because I do feel that the good people in our own company -- and we ourselves perhaps included -- would be quite proud if we today could write such a letter to Mr. Harry Dexter White.

First he -- he makes two points. The letter is written May 17th, 1846. That is, a half a year before, or -- yes, half a -- it's eight months before The Communist Manifesto was written. It's really in the cradle, so to speak, of all these tremendous ideas of the following century. He makes two points. One, that he doesn't want to become a new dogmatist in economics, and that he demands from Marx, for Heaven's sake, not to proclaim a new dogma in economics. And secondly, that he doesn't believe in violence. He doesn't believe in the use of force in economic reforms. And so, this is what he says:

"Although my own ideas on the organization and realization of social aims are more or less fixed -- well, at least with regard to the principles -- I think all the more it to be my duty as a socialist and the duty of any socialist to conserve for a long time to come still the ancient form of the dubitative, of doubt. I profess before the public as my firm conviction an anti-dogmatism in economics, so to speak, of an abs- -- of a so to speak absolute character."

I have to translate it from the French; so you understand why I do it haltingly.

"Let us do s- -- research together, if you like. If -- all the laws of society, all the ways by which these laws are realized, all the progress according -- or to which we may succeed to discover these laws, mais -- but for God's sake..."

...pour Dieu, in French...

"...but for God's sake, after we have demolished all the a prioris and the dogmas of the times before, let us not think now in turn to indoctrinate the people. Let us not fall into the contradiction of your compatriot Martin Luther, who, after he had reversed the Catholic theology immediately went out with the great reinforcement of excommunications and anathemas to found a Protestant theology.

"For three centuries, Germany has been occupied with nothing but the destruction of these new plaster casts of Martin Luther. Let us not cut out for the human race this new worry of a new strait-jacket. I applaud by -- wholeheartedly your idea to supersede one day all mere opinions. I also welcome your bon and loyal polemics. But let us give to the world the example of a -- of a

scholarly toleration, which is pres voyons..."

...prudent, perhaps...

"...and since we are..."

...as he very modestly says...

"...we are at the head of the movement..."

...everybody always thinks this...

"...let us not make ourselves the heads of the new intolerance. Let us not pose as the apostles of a new religion, even if it is a the religion of logic and the religion of reason. Let us encourage all the protestations. Let us disregard -- or let us berate all the excommunications and all the mysticisms. Let us never consider any question as exhausted. And when we have used our last argument, let us begin again, if it is necessary, all over with the eloque- -- with eloquence and irony. At this condition, I shall like very much to be associated -- with you. If not, not."

If you don't fulfill this condition, no. That's the great declaration of war between Proudhon then. And this book here is the vindication, of, you see, the terrible price Proudhon had to pay for his letter, because this is written against Proudhon. And ever since, no decent Marxian has, you see, heard the name of Proudhon without sneering. The second thing is:

"You mention that we trouv- -- fi- -- find ourselves at the moment of action. Perhaps it is necessary that you -- we are quite clear on this point. You obviously believe that a reform is impossible without a Putsch, without something with which one day, one time..."

...it's wonderful in 1846...

"...{jadice} -- which long ago was called revolution and which obviously is -- is a real earthquake. In my opinion, this is obsolete. For a long time, I shared your conviction, but my last studies have made me reverse my thought on this completely. I think that society may be able to change the ways of its wealth in a -- from the inside, and that it is not necessary to destroy property in a new night of St. Bartholom‚, but that instead we can roast it on a small fire."

So, 1846, the whole line is drawn. Here is the most radical socialist. The man

who wrote, "property is theft," "La propert‚, c'est {le vol}," and who says to Marx, "No."

What did Marx then mean? If you use an American simile, you will understand what these disangelists undertook. In America, ever since the Declaration of Independence, down to 1920 or to the McCarran Act, this country has remained stand-pat on its constitution, and has practically never changed it, because every immigrant had to take an oath on this constitution and time had to stand still. This country which boasts that it is so very progressive is the only conservative country in the world, as this -- as you know, because it has a constitution dated from 1787 or '89, and it hasn't changed it. And it's still there, although of course -- well, I won't say anything anymore. But the judges know more about it.

But the -- still, we had a movement on foot -- millions of people like myself coming to these shores and trying to find shelter. At this moment, you cannot change the form of the shelter. The shelter has to remain the same. Now in Europe, Marx tried to do exactly this, to draw up a program which could serve as a -- as a shelter for the last man to join the ranks of the proletarian army, including the daughters of -- of all the -- of all the employers, who had to become typists and secretaries. That is, the mass, the ranks of the employees have now, you see, become so large as you know that they have 63 million jobs; and we mean by this, employees.

So all these hundred years, Marx said it is not important to be -- to doubt or to progress or to change one's mind, but to offer one symbol of recognition and identification to these masses, just as the American Constitution has offered all the newcomers to this country this firm identity -- symbol of identity: that it is one country with the same principles for 150 years, regardless of the date of landing in this country.

With this simile, I would like to finish today, because the century -- this last century then, perhaps becomes visible to you as really extraordinary, as the founding of a secular church or secular movements having the same practice as the early Christians, but trying to achieve the opposite -- not leading man into the fulfillment of his purpose, but declaring at the same time that man couldn't do anything about this fulfillment, that the class wars were something that you cannot -- couldn't do anything -- the economic development would take care of that -- Charles Darwin proclaiming in the same way that the struggle was endless; Nietzsche telling us that man had just to go from one sensation, from one superhuman effort to the next, and Freud dissolving every task of tradition, of inheritance, as too sacrificial, as too destructive, as too oppressive. Let us see tomorrow in a -- how far we perhaps can have the great privilege to reap where we haven't sown and how far these four

evangelists of doom may allow us to have peace in our time.

[applause]

(Hutchison: Prof. Rosenstock-Huessy has kindly consented to answer some questions now, and after perhaps 10 or 15 minutes, the committee invites you all to join them down in the faculty lounge for coffee and a further informal discussion with Dr. Rosenstock-Huessy. Has anyone got any questions now?)

(If it isn't too long a one, Sir, I would like to ask about the distinction between Christianity and myth.)

I mustn't have made myself quite clear. It is important to the history of Christianity that the time of the founder is, so to speak, extrapolated. That is, that he lives on this earth, but is not recognized, is a failure, and is from the cradle to the grave one living sacrifice. Now "sacrifice" means the forgoing of the temporary success, or shape, or hue, or per- -- perfection in one's own day, of one's achievement, of this famous pursuit of happiness. Jesus obviously didn't pursue His happiness. And the myth of any profession, of any department of life, of any time is that which is necessary for the achievement of this temporal end. You cannot get engaged without being crazy. But that's a myth. You have to say the word, and then you get married. And the story of your marriage includes this mythical situation of being engaged, you see. Every decent bridegroom on the -- his wedding day is very sick, as you know. It's a terrible ordeal. I don't know about the lady, but I know about myself. I had a migraine, and -- migraine, you call it.

And now, I mean very much -- I mean, Wagner says it very beautifully in "The Master Singers" that craze or frenzy is necessary for the achievement of any one temporal aim. And this always gets around itself -- this consciousness you see, which is mythological. You cannot see yourself, you see, in this state of frenzy, as others see you. And you must have the power to -- not to compare notes with others, you see, but to stand, so to speak, your own frenzy. And the divine, or the demonic in this moment is necessary for its fulfillment. Nobody can go over the parapet in -- and advance in Korea without either alcohol or patriotism. And so that is frenzy, because here these psychoanalysts sit, or these psychologists who advise the Army and -- and tell you the mechanism how to arouse patriotism, these scoundrels. They think they are outside the myth.

Now fortunately they aren't, I mean, they aren't as bad as they make themselves. But there is no achievement in the world. You can't go into an examination without some such mythological frenzy. And this, however, is not -- is only the beginning. This frenzy is -- levels off and afterwards, you must not despise

the myth, but you must recognize its -- its place. Now Christianity has made the discovery that man needs frenzy and passion to achieve anything. The misunderstanding of the Disciples, their devotion for the Lord, you see, their squabbling over the seats in the kingdom of Heaven were inevitable. They had -- had to do this in order to learn, you see. So their myth, while Jesus was on earth -- very -- very poignant, just terrible, complete misunderstanding. Everything. Not only Judas. Peter just the same, and John, you see. Even John. You know, they -- they -- they -- he -- they -- he discusses where his seats will be in -- in Heaven, in the sky. Well, so with everybody.

There is no way of growing, except by going through the myth, through your mythical period. So legend and myth have their necessary place in the life of the race. And woe to these people who now give them these children's books without myth, instead of telling them really fairy tales, really mythological and legendary stories. They tell them scientific stories. All this enlightenment about sex and all this nonsense. They want to deprive people of this -- this -- the time in which frenzy must find expression in a myth. Who wants to know anything about the sex organs? They want to know what it means to be in love, which has nothing to do with sex. The Sleeping Beauty is a much truer love -- certainly interpretation of sex life than the whole biology -- everything taken together. But we have just, you see, tried to make the myth of the man of 40, the sci- -- his science, you see, his frenzy for his work into the only myth that is permissible to mankind today.

Well, every age and every sex and every nation has, of course -- they must have their own myth, otherwise they cannot -- they cannot pass through the ordeal where they cannot be recognized by the rest of the world. Any moment in which you are in solitude, you are mythological, because you are wrapped in this cloud. But if you believe in prophecy, if you believe in fulfillment if you believe in -- pardon me -- in promise, you see, if you believe in grace, you undergo this frenzy, this -- this, your own passion in the knowledge that it is a phase, that this is not the whole story.

I mean, take Jesus in Gethsemane. It's a great -- as you know, it's a great tradition that He really believed one moment that God would allow the cup to pass in the frenzy of His -- of this ordeal. And He -- that's how He became human. Without this prayer, He would not be our brother. And yet it was all obvious that it couldn't be.

Well, this is the human situation, that at no one time where we are acting are we allowed to know what's happening. This is ridiculous. { } the -- the -- the -- a man who is creating, as soon as he wants to know what he is doing while he is creating, splits into object and subject. He wants to stand before the mirror and

he is impotent. And impotency rules the world today because of this: because people think that self-knowledge is more important than creation. Creation you -- creative -- can only be when you forgo self-consciousness and have -- even prefer a wrong interpretation of what you're doing, you see, to knowing exactly analytically what you're doing. How can anybody otherwise ever get engaged in his five senses? Marriage is based on this power still to have frenzy. The people don't get engaged today. They just have a -- an affair together and they call this marriage. That isn't marriage. I mean, oth- -- you see, real -- people who are really married cannot be divorced, and since so many people are divorced, obviously they never have been married, because they have been told that they must not be in a frenzy; they mustn't be in love. So they aren't. They have just -- they are just in sex.

They -- I mean all this, Sir, you see. Love, after all, is -- is this power to be alone with your passion in the spiritual sense, you see -- that something has befallen you which nobody else at this moment can endure. Very often the lady herself isn't yet ready. Well, great love that cannot endure, that cannot wait, that cannot court, that cannot woo, is not love. And there is so little love today in the world because it if isn't immediately understood, "Let's get married," then the boy says, "Well, then it isn't right," instead of -- of -- of writing poetry for three years. That's his myth, you see, the three years of poetry.

So, pardon me, but we have to -- to see now that myth is the one -- one generation's -- situation or one-phase situation of the human mind in disconnection with the other phases, you see. And the more passion, the more powerful this one phase is -- with something -- take the inventor. Don't you think Mr. Lindbergh or the Orville -- the brother Wrights were obsessed with this plane? If you read -- I have read their life and their correspondence -- I mean, terribly narrowminded people -- they really thought that the salvation of the world depended on -- on the aircraft, you see. Now we know it, the -- just the atom bomb depended on it. Is this enough, Sir?

(Thank you very much.)

(Hutchison: Any more questions? Bill?)

(What was the myth from which Marxism stood apart, in order to create its -- its own myth?)

The harmony, the -- the humanistic myth, that anything in this modern society, because they had all Greek names, called themselves Caesar and Alcibiades, that for this reason, harmony would win out -- the True, the Beautiful, and the Good -- that the capitalistic society was, you see -- could not help leading to

harmony. This is the idealism of the time. And that's the myth of the -- the times of philosophers, where the philosophers tried to be kings, and instead, became journalists. Well, that's what it is. It is the time where the philosophy was put in the headlines, the editorials of The New York Times or the -- then it was the -- Mr. Gordon Bennett, as you know, here instead, and where the -- where really the people thought that -- that philosophy would do away with all sufferings of humanity. This is a great era, I mean, it's -- people believe it. In the beginning of the 19th century, this was -- this what -- to what I wanted to lead you up to -- 1847, people really believed that the -- the harmony of hu- -- the human mind, of the human reason was such that everything could be dissolved. Is -- does this satisfy your -- with your question? Sir? Where is he? Where's Bill? Wie?

(Hutchison: Any more, {Lyle}? { }?)

(Was Christian idealism ever a creative myth? I mean, a -- it was a frenzy, we might say, a vision ... )

Well, I think Christianity came into the world against idealism. And that when it was said more and more since Marsilio Ficino and the neo-Platonists of 1500 that perhaps we could replace Christianity by idealism, that then there was no Christianity. I think that Christianity and idealism are devoid of all meaning. You can put them together or you can also say that it is a wooden iron. It has absolutely nothing to do with each other, because the Father and the Son obviously declaims that man in no phase of his existence is the whole man, as created by God. And the idealist says that "At this moment, I have at my disposal all the mental powers than can be equated with the divine spirit." That's a very simple dis- -- distinction between idealism, and the belief in the Trinity, that the Holy Spirit has to pass through the de- -- two generations of the Old Testament and the New Testament, of the Father and the Son, and that the -- idealist says that "I know God, because I am God."

This is very simple. No time in idealism, you see. No way of going through your mythical phase and -- and skin -- and shedding it. There's no time element in idealism. No history.

Would you kindly take it very seriously? I think the whole crux of the matter is really that in Christianity, there is promise, because the Old Testament is received. It's necessary. Why do you go to church? Because that's the part of Israel that is the law that is still there. That's not Christ- -- that's not the fulfillment, that's the promise, when you baptize a child. Do you think it is free when it is baptized? It doesn't even go to the toilet.

It's ridiculous. If you treat all -- everything that goes on in Christianity as not

be -- having to do with these great four phases of promise, of fulfillment, of apostolicity, and of the story --the Gospel. Every one of us, if he is really living at all, goes through these four phases, because you have to be true to your own calling, to your own moment of divinity. No artist who has received the divine spirit, you see, who not has then to be his own apostle, that is, to serve without remuneration in a very hard -- think of Gaugin and these people. There is apostolicity to a mission that -- that really didn't pay dividends. And now we -- we fructify from what Gaugin did for the freeing of the Western mind, from its Greek and idealistic patterns.

You can look everywhere in the world and these four things stand out, that a man who does not respect the high moments of his life and puts his future -- the rest of his life under this highest moment, is not fit for the kingdom of Heaven. You must recognize the great moments of your life and then you have to obey them. And that is life like the Cross. That is the fulfillment. It looks very different, as I told you, from the promise, because it is a very, very long road afterwards, after the revelation, after the greatness of the moment has occurred.

But all this is today not -- people won't apply. Think of any man who decides to be -- take the Orville Wright brothers or -- take Robert -- or Bob Mitchell who -- or take Admiral {Symmes}, or any man in the secular field whose -- who -- who -- on whom it fall -- whom it befalls, you see, to carry through one thing which at one moment got hold of him and he knew that nobody else was going to do it if he didn't do it. Well, it takes them 30 -- 40 years, you see, and you have to go from Jerusalem to Rome to do it. Or from Pontius to Pilate, as we say.

Don't you see that your own life is full of this mir- -- miracle and this law and this order? Only idealists, they don't want to see it. They never have discovered their truth, because it's -- it is the True, the Good and the Beautiful. But everybody's truth is -- has to be discovered in -- during his own life, and then he has to follow it out and to obey it. And if he can do it in company, in friendship, in marriage, in family life, in -- in your profession -- as the doctors, for example, can do it in brotherhood -- all the better. But it is still one thing, you see, to discover the great task and then to carry it out obediently. The Lord forwent this privilege of carrying out. He -- He knew He had to put it on other shoulders to make it visible, that one man's life and all mankind's life is the same life. There's no difference. The history of the human race only consists in being exactly as loyal as Jesus was in the various stations of life. There is no other history. Or, at least not to me.

All these, what they call history has nothing to do with the real events of -- in humanity. Ja?

(Dr. Freud came in for a bit of -- of -- shall we say, attack -- here. I just wonder, can you point -- point up -- where is the crux of Freud's error, as opposed to the other three disevangelists?)

Well, I think that there are four things which this disangelism -- is there still time to speak? I don't wish to keep you.

The -- when this era started, 1846, when Mr. Proudhon wrote this very optimistic letter to Marx and said there's neither violence nor agreement necessary, the -- the -- the idealists were in -- in the upper -- had the upper hand. It was a philosophical society. It was a time when Unitarianism ruled the world. And there was no divinity necessary, anymore. Man -- humanity -- humanism had completely conquered. That is, after all, Unitarianism. And you know they were very strong at that time, and very rich in America. And these Unitarians were very good people. They believed that philosophy had to rule theology and that you didn't need any more -- anything more.

Why were they wrong? They didn't see, I think, the miraculous character of peace. The doctrine which Proudhon, for example, had to fight, was that peace was natural and war was unnatural. We know better. We know that war is natural and peace is miraculous. They thought that speech was natural and thought -- or philosophy, perhaps -- was miraculous or divine. We know that it is very easy to have opinions privately, but it is miraculous if another man understands you. That is, we know that speech is miraculous and not natural.

We know these two things. We know thirdly that sex is natural, but love is supernatural. We know that there is no love without sacrifice. We know that my great predecessor, Giuseppe Ferrari, whom I think to be one of the very great thinkers of the 19th century -- and that's why he's completely forgotten -- was -- discovered a great Christian truth in unique language when he said that love is desire -- we would say today of course in America "sex" -- desire and sacrifice in balance. These -- we, you see -- you asked about Freud. Mr. Freud has completely forgotten that the story of love is in three phases, too. It is desire, on the male side. It is the victory to be loved, and then the willingness to live -- love in return. That is, there are three phases in the lovemaking process. The male desires, and proposes, and courts, and hopes to arouse love in the mate, because this woman is not interested in the desire of the mate, but in a -- in his provisions for a home, and for the future, and for a long life. And he -- she will only do this if she feels that she can love this individual, this monster. For this, the male responds with his love, because he's so moved by the sacrifice, that he now begins to love -- which as a male in the beginning, he just doesn't know how to do.

It is a great error of our society today that they always confuse sex and love,

whereas love is the third phase and can only be acquired by a male being, after he has experienced what it means to be loved. That's why motherly love in this country spielt such a terrible part in this love process, because the boys do not wait till the girl loves them. The girl only goes to bed with him -- pardon me. But the -- the mother stays, and that's the only love they have really experienced. That's the -- the mother complex in this country, the generations of wipers -- vipers.

It's a very simple thing. Nobody's at fault. "At fault" is the wrong philosophy which says that you can have it all at once, that love is at the first -- at first sight. Desire is at first sight. Let's be frank. But Mr. Freud is wrong when he thinks that's the whole story. There the -- the -- the story begins only and he omits the recognition that somebody loves me and that I'm so overwhelmed by this experience that somebody new whom I didn't know before, who isn't my mother, that somebody in this wide ocean, or desert, or the wilderness, or Sahara of the universe is good enough to pin her eyes on me in such a way that she trusts me, that this trust, of course, has to be answered by my love. And in this sense her faith and my love have to be, so to speak, squared.

All this is forgotten today. And certainly it's very terrible that it is forgotten. There is no courtship in this country. Sex is always mistaken for love. And they call it love and they mean sex. Or they mean kindness and call this love -- this -- it's not so simple, gentlemen. You cannot -- you marry because you like this girl and you are kind to her. That's not the process of becoming one in -- in a sacramental sense. It is much more serious that you have to wait till you really can be sure that she loves you. And that means that she trusts you spiritually. That the word that you say to her can -- is held by her to be the sacrament of -- of -- of -- of the Word, in the logos sense of St. John, that this word is spoken with such power by you that you wish to be tied by it for the rest of your life.

In this very moment, you can be -- a friend of mine, some of -- may have heard of you -- Franz Rosenzweig, once said in his Star of Redemption that love was a very strange process, because it had to be renewed every morning and it was very miraculous: one loved every morning a little better. But it -- one shouldn't think that love was a constant, but it was a rediscovery, or a re-awakening to this love. And then it could be felt to be more miraculous every day, and more grand, and more comprehensive, and more encompassing. But the main fact is that we could not think, since it was a living force, it was just as much as breathing something that we had to let -- to surge up again and again. And the idea that it had just continuity would kill it. And they should -- one shouldn't equate boredom and marriage.

(Hutchison: Would you like to adjourn now to the --?)

As I said, I am at your orders, Sir.

(Hutchison: Any more questions?)

(I'm surprised at the amount that the good doctor has been taken in by American advertising and the popular novel in these last comments. To say the American scheme, so-and-so, seems to me to be living in a world that is not -- that the average, the common man, in -- in dealing with the problem of the reality of life, has -- has actually moved into the area of which you seem to approve.)

I'm convinced of this. I think anybody who escapes college is absolutely sound in this country.