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{word} = hard to understand, might be this

Student introduction: (Philosophy 58, April 29th, 1954)

[Opening remarks missing]

... enlarge into the field of varieties. So the Greeks begin, gentlemen, with the single, and they end up with the many. And that is the Greek tragedy. And how was it -- you however begin with the many, and you will be cursed if you don't find a single. And that is your problem. If you will remain deracin‚s, uprooted, and never have any one cause, one aim, one single god to whom you can dedicate yourself, you remain unborn, as the -- as two boys who wrote a report on the modern American boy 10 years ago in my class, came back with a report of their canvass: the soul remains unborn. The soul remains unborn. Gentlemen, the human soul remains unborn as long as you have many people whom you know. You need an alter ego. Unless you can say to a person, "Without you, I cannot live," you certainly have not discovered a soul. And that is the way God speaks to you one day, when He says to you, "I need you. And you have to give up what you want to have in life, because I need you." At this very moment, you discover your soul. Otherwise you have no soul. Don't think that you have a soul on -- on account with your grocer. You cannot go there and say, "Deliver my soul." It isn't there. It hasn't been born.

Therefore, gentlemen, the Greek problem is your problem, only in the diverse ratio, and diverse direction. The Greeks are 1000 B.C. to the times of Christ the discoverers of the many in addition to the one. Your problem, as students in a liberal arts college is the discovery of the one in addition to the many. And since you decline even to look in this direction, you remain unborn. Most of the souls of modern men are unborn. They look so funny. I mean, that's -- I think we invented all these televisions and -- and motion pictures and so, because we can encompass there so many people. And they all look alike, and they all can be reached by statistics. And they all act alike, day and night. You can predict every one of you. I know exactly what you will do for the last 50 years -- next 50 years of your life. You are stinky boring. Uninteresting. Uninteresting. You are just the products of your environment, and you boast of it. You say, "Everybody does it." That's your justification for your actions. Everybody does it. Why should I -- should I be interested in somebody who does as everybody else does? Zero. A hundred times zero is still zero.

You say so. You say, "I too have to behave, because everyone" -- I have heard, people say to me, and you hear this every day, "In days like today, you have just to act." Do you think the people had any other problem in any other time of -- in

the last 7,000 years of the race? You should have -- give up such a stupidity to telling me that in our days you just have to do this, unfortunately. Yesterday you wouldn't and tomorrow you won't. But today. Gentlemen, so stupid former people didn't dare to be, to excuse themselves with the attempt not to exist, not to be born. That's what you do -- from morning to day -- to evening, your whole endeavor is not to be seen, not to be exposed, not to be held up, not to be one of the Joneses. That's your whole { } ambition, not to be -- to be noticed. Well, gentlemen, certainly. A drop in the -- in the bucket.

So gentlemen, will you see that the Greeks were only alive as long as the compromise between singleness and many-ness, that no -- even the Greek order is impossible as a real order, if it is many-ness only. Your idea is that many-ness itself, The New York Times, and everything it stands for, is -- is possible, is order. It's only disorder, gentlemen. It's -- has to be wiped out, our papers and all our enjoyments. That is just Broadway. That cannot stand on its own legs, you see. That can be the spice of life, the condiment; it can be an addition, but it is never the thing -- your own thing. You cannot go from one theater on Broadway to the next, and to the next, and to the next. You must have one principle of which you know when to go to Broadway for entertainment, between two {real acts} of life, you see, when it doesn't matter. Broadway doesn't matter. But you think it matters.

Now gentlemen, the way into the Greek tragedy is a very exciting way. We have to assume, and we know, as -- as more than assumption -- that the Greeks were tribesmen who came to the sea. I have mentioned this last time, {did I?}. We also know that Homer is the first form in which the Greeks talk to each other of the many-nesses of their very many forms of constitutions of cities. You remember the catalog of the ships, in which they presented to each other the glories of every one city. That is Homer's act, that he acts as a matter -- master of ceremonies between the tribes of Greece. The tragedy, the Greek tragedy, as acted after 500 by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and by the comedian Aristophanes, is a compromise between cult and epics, between Homer and religion. That is for -- unknown to you. And I mention it because it is very exciting. The history of tragedy demanded the pre-existence of Homer. It is not an accident that Homer is 300 or 400 years older than the Greek tragedy, because the epics were decidedly not the present of the Greeks. It was the far -- the far-distant past in which many-ness could be stomached. It was harmless. They were one on a common enterprise against the Trojans, you see. And the modern man could be reminded of this one -- of this many-ness of the Greeks in the past, when they came first into the Mediterranean. The Greek tragedy, gentlemen, as you can see, makes use of Homer's discovery, of the many cities of man, of the many ships, of the many heroes, and endows the individual tragedy with both the full fervor of a cult. It's still one hero in every one tragedy -- he or she, and nobody else, you

see -- but it allows to go on from one such purification of the soul to another.

So each tragedy is not epical, because it's only one hero, you see. But the existence of tragedy as a form of art, inherits the Homeric many-ness, the inherent plurality. Can you see this very strange process? And there comes -- you can still trace it -- in the fact that the tragedy is composed of chorus and hero, the main actor. And in the first tragedies, the hero does not speak. Like the hero in the cult, he is in the grave. He is dead. He has to be worshiped. You have to expiate for him. You have to make sacrifices. All the ritual of the true hero-worship of the tribe is still to be seen, for example, Prometheus. When the stage, you see, opens, he doesn't speak. The others act for him. He is silent. That is not accidental, gentlemen. The Greek tragedy doesn't begin with the discovery of a soliloquy, as in Hamlet -- "To be or not to be" -- or with your own lyrics, as you would think poetry --. You take for granted that everybody can speak. That is a discovery, gentlemen, under what conditions people can speak. The chorus can speak among themselves about the hero. That's the Homeric, lyrical discovery, or epical discovery, carried then into the choirs -- songs of the choir; and it took a long time to invent the second actor on the stage who would be then enabled to -- to get between the silent hero and the chorus and inter-mediate, so to speak, {and produce} the dialogue.

So gentlemen, I {take} to the -- I can only deal with these things in a very brief manner. But perhaps you formulate it in one great thing, that every one form of human utterance, gentlemen, had to be conquered under tremendous difficulty. Everything you take for granted as a way of expressing yourself was at one time non-existent. At first, gentlemen, children and women did not speak, but only the men in the orgies of the tribe listened to the impersonator of the dead. You remember, the masks of the -- of the sorcerer speaking to the living. The dead spoke to the living in the tribe. In the Egyptian temples, I tried to tell you that the heavens spoke to the earth, that these movements of the stars were impersonated by the priests in their hieroglyphs, and taught the people on earth. As in Heaven, so be it on earth. Now in Israel, the prophet speaks already of the future, you see, and the future speaks to the present, and gets people into the future out of their present and out of their past. The future, the messian- -- messianic prophecy speaks God, who is in coming -- the coming Lord speaks to the people that are here in their incompleteness of their creature existence. In Greece, gentlemen, it is neither that the dead speak to the living, nor is it that the heavens speak to earth, nor is it that the future speaks to the present. What is it in -- in Greek? What is the Greek tragedy? It is dialogue, that people in different orders -- remember Priamus and Achillus. You heard this in -- in class, you see, that they are both using their own cult, their own political principles, their own traditions. And yet they speak of those separate fates, destinies, traditions, to each other.

That is called humanism, gentlemen. And you misunderstand it. You hear this word "humanism" bandied around a lot in this modern world. Humanism is something very specific. Humanism is the power of a member of one group to meet a member of another group. The wrong definition of humanism is that human beings meet, naked individuals, you see. That's your idea of humanism. It has never existed. Priam, as the father of Hector, and the king of Troy, meets the heroes of Thessaly and the son of the sea-goddess Thetis and of Jupiter. And they can exchange their fatal separation in dialogue. They can see each other in their awkward -- division. That is humanism, gentlemen. Humanism is man's power to look into other men's orders and ways of life. What you think is humanism is -- that's bestiality. That's the modern zoo. One animal seeing that -- another animal is hungry and scratches itself. That's not humanism, because there is no way of life that can go on on both sides. They're just two apes.

That's not humanism. That's why humanism today is dying. There is -- in this liberal arts college no humanistic tradition anymore. Because nobody takes the political limitations -- the Constitution of the United States, the religion of your Congregational church, or your Episcopal church -- {any way serious}. Do you think you meet another fellow regardless of his way of life? Gentlemen, if a Roman Catholic and a Moslem really meet, that's a tremendous victory. That's a great effort. The -- Franco has now concluded a treaty with the -- with the Mus- -- mullah of Egypt. And so, in fact a Roman Catholic extremist, like Franco of Spain, and the most fanatical Moslem leader of the world have concluded a treaty. That is humanism, because they have two ways of life to defend. And they have compromised.

But if you meet somebody else in a pissoir or in a poolroom, you meet there without any paraphernalia, without any dress, without anything you present. You don't send for anything. You have abs- -- you have given all up, all your bondage, all your bonds.

I always tell the story, gentlemen, of the -- of the Aramco in -- in Arabia, who have on good American dollars built a city for the Bedouins there to make them {more} -- drill the oil. And they have -- they are flying there the flag of the prophet -- I think it's green, and the half-moon, the crescent moon. And you can read then on -- on American ground, and American -- paid by American money, "Allah is great, and -- and Mohammed is his prophet." That is the decline of humanism. These Americans no longer have anything they stand for. But in order to win -- make money, they are willing to worship another man's religion. And you are sick from this, gentlemen, and this country is doomed as long as it does such things. Nothing makes man more despicable than to do such a thing. It's contemptible.

It's not nice. It's not human, gentlemen, It's the opposite from humanism. Because here is a human being who has given up his own humanity. There's no excuse for this. A Frenchman nearly fell into my arms and embraced me, in Egypt, and said, "Tell the people in America that they mustn't do this. That's the end of the world." A Frenchman, in the desert of Egypt. He -- he cornered me on this. He talked to me about it. He made -- drew my attention to this fact. And he said, "This is the end of the world. If the white man does this, he deserves to be immediately wiped out."

But that's what you call humanism. And that's why I have to draw your attention to the fact that the Greek tragedy still is tragic. That is, the hero remains a part of this one order of life. Antigone, you see, and Agamemnon, and Oedipus, they face a tragic death, and that is tragedy, gentlemen, to be still part and parcel of one way of life, and not to be able to say, "Oh, forget it all," you see. "We take a -- go on a cruise to the Bermudas." That's what you call humanism, when nothing is serious. Gentlemen, the Greek tragedy is still terribly serious. But through the fissures, through the -- through the seams of the column in -- into which every one hero is bewitched, so to speak, you can hear his cry, you can hear his sigh, you can hear his yearning for a wider world, a larger world in which the conditions of his law and of his city may be changed. But in the meantime, he has to pay the penalty. But if it were with you, you see, you wouldn't pay. Why? Benedict Arnold, must he be shot? Must people be executed? Must the Rosenbergs be executed? There you have a very clear case. The intellectuals of this country, and of France, and Europe didn't understand, that of course, an intellectual has to be more executed than the man who is not an intellectual, that this was justice.

We go back today to singleness. The -- I think the Rosenberg case will rank in the history of the United States as the moment in which the blind reception of the Greek renaissance came to an end, in this country. And we discovered singularity -- singleness of purpose again, where we had to shut up with many-ness, and with news, and with marketplace, and with arbitrary, you see, arbitrary ideas -- every day another one.

Here something happened and you had to draw the line. Nothing to -- that's pre-Greek, gentlemen, the Rosenberg case. It's a very important case, gentlemen. I had to defend this country in many letters to Europe on account of this case, because the Rosenberg case has been abused by the Communists in Europe to a violent anti-American propaganda. The Communists execute a million people; we execute two, so of course we are the barbarians and the Russians are very sweet, you see, and progressive. And it was -- is incredible how it has worked. I am told that there is a book by a Rabbi Feinberg -- has anybody seen it, on the Rosenberg case? -- in which he describes the endless serpent of woe produced by

-- this.

Gentlemen, if you wish to come to the root of American weakness at this moment, it is this definite superstition of every American college boy, that he lives in a world of many objects. That's Greek. And that he looks around and gets acquainted. And that Hamlet is an object of his interest, and that Othello is an interest of another moment, and Henry IV. You treat the world objectively, don't you? And that's why you cannot live. Nobody can live who treats the world objectively. We are not born into the world objectively, gentlemen. Who has taken Philosophy 9 with me? You may recall that I there -- very seriously there exposed to you the fact that we were prejects, that we were thrown forward into time, you see, and that we came out of a past from which we were trajected, and that object and subject were only a very minor division of inner and outer. Now the Greek world, gentlemen, of object and subject is a world today under indictment. You and I are neither subjects nor objects. Are you the objects of what I am saying at this moment? Am I the subject? If this were so, you shouldn't listen. We are not here together as subjects and -- and objects. In what capacity are you in here -- and I -- together? Has it -- makes it any sense to call me a subject of what I am saying here? And you the object? The objects of my treatment, of my teaching? As -- it has been defined in textbooks even of education that a student is an object of a teacher. Of course, he isn't. It's obviously nonsense, you see.

What are we then, gentlemen? What are we -- in order to get out of this nightmare of Greek -- mere Greek humanism -- misunderstood, in addition. There are two features, gentlemen, about the influence of the college on your mind at this moment, on which I wanted today to be very explicit. One is that you think your allegiances can be many. Wherever you have the gods instead of God, wherever you happen to have the sciences instead of science, wherever you have any plural, you have no time sense. Wherever we have the plural, gentlemen, we have no sense of timing, because the first discovery of the time sense is that there must be one thing only, now. The next. God's unity, gentlemen, in Israel, and the creation of the future are identical. God is only one, if He is coming in the future. If you look at the gods, as they have created the world in the past, there is absolutely no reason to believe that South America and Africa were created by the same god. No reason to believe it. Many. It is only the future that makes you and me, you see, in -- squeezes us in such a position, in a vise, where we with necessity must yearn for the one and only. And only who he yearns for the one and only understands the God of Christianity, and the God of the Creed, and the God of the Old Testament. The Biblical God is the God who is, because He is the future God, the one God.

Everything in the Bible about the past is said with regard to the future. God

created Heaven and earth in the beginning, because at the end there will be the Sabbath. You and I expect the peace of God at the end. And because God rested on the seventh day, therefore we also understand what went on before. He acted so that He might rest. That is, the future explains in the Bible every past history. It is not a story, as you think, beginning at the beginning and then leading somewhere -- nowhere, you see. Quite the contrary. The whole Bible is written from the end back into the past. When Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt, he said, "Now I understand everything that happened before. It must have happened as we left Egypt behind. So Abraham left behind human sacrifice. Now I understand why he didn't sacrifice Isaac. Now I understand why the heavens were first created light and then -- as one generation of God's action -- and then on the other six days all -- everything came to pass. That wasn't evolution. That was as powerful a breakoff, a decision, a cutting off of the ways of life of one day by the ways of life of the next day, as now, where we shall stand in the desert, we have to create a new way of life quite different from the Egyptian way of life."

That is, gentlemen, the whole Bible is written from experience, backward. That's the meaning of the Bible, to write backward. And that's why God is one, even at the beginning, where all the other cosmogonies have many gods.

We'll see in the New Testament how -- how important there the same -- the same principle is. But the Greeks, gentlemen, say many. They say "states." They say "citizens" -- "cities." They say "politics." They say the plural of -- about everything, and therefore they have no future. The whole philosophy of the Greeks and of Mr. Toynbee, who is a good Greek -- or a poor Greek, that's as you like to call him -- and Mr. Spengler, and all the books you worship or you are asked to worship, they are all Greek. They cannot have anything about one. They can only have about many. I don't know, how many civilizations has Mr. Toynbee to offer? Twenty-three is -- I think it is. Of course, what else can you expect from a man who looks not forward and is not taught by the task of tomorrow, who isn't waiting for God to come, and doesn't explain the past by the future. Gentlemen, I will only be able to understand your biography after you have gotten married and have grandchildren or no grandchildren, and have a vocation. At your 70th birthday, I can say it makes sense that you went to Dartmouth College. At this moment, it's very doubtful what it means. It can be the beginning of the end. It can also be the end of the beginning.

The future explains the past, gentlemen. Therefore the singular. Wherever you try to do without the future, for explaining life, you get the plural. Wherever you get the plural, gentlemen, you get the division of man into object and subject. Every Greek mind is fascist, because the mind always wants to predict and to understand. The Gallup Poll is Greek, fascism is Greek, Malenkov is Greek. We

live today in fascism and Communism under the domination of the human mind. These people are people who say, "The mind is not made over by the future, but the mind brings on the future, he plans the future. He," you see, "he forces everybody who doesn't com- -- com- -- comply with my categories of thinking to go to the concentration camp." Because the mind rules the rest of the world in an objective, in a scientific manner. And you believe it. You think that's good. It's terrible, gentlemen, if people are governed by the scientific mind, because then they will become very cruel. The scientific mind is the most fanatic mind there is. All the mis -- superstitions of the past, gentlemen, were all scientific. That is, they were all here, from the mind, without the heart. The mind had to be right. If you take the astrologers, the sorcerer of Egypt, they were highly scientific, gentlemen.

Don't believe, gentlemen, that the mind is not the seat of the evil. You say -- I have said, you have to decide. Plato said the body is the seat of evil. And I can only hold against this the experience of all non-Greeks, that the mind is the sinner, that the human thinking makes it so. I -- in itself nothing is good or evil, but thinking makes it so. That's good Shakespearean truth, as you know. Where is it?

(Hamlet.)

Yes.

Now, gentlemen, what are you and I, I ask you? I certainly am not the subject of what I am trying to do, and I -- you are not the objects of what you try to take with you. You are younger, and I am older. So obviously we are related through time and not through space. You are not standing against me as objects. This is the first error, gentlemen, of objectivity, that it divides space. You can't get out of the fact that all science is wrong and unreal, because it divides space -- which cannot be separated, it's one -- into two spaces. One of the observer, and one of the facts observed. The observer is in one space, because otherwise you cannot observe the facts. And therefore the -- direction, the fragmentation of space is a fallacy of your mind. All minds want to have a mirror image, and the mirror is always a different space, produces a second space from the thing mirrored. I am not mirroring, and you are not reflecting on me, gentlemen, if you learn at this moment. If -- you can very clearly see how -- what happens when you treat me as your object of your attention. As soon as you look at me as a quadruped, and say this man has a blue shirt, and such shoes, and such hair, and such height, and such looks, and such accent, you have ceased to listen to me. You look at me. You can do this, gentlemen, at the penalty that you are here for no good purpose. That is your objectivity. The objectivity, gentlemen, eliminates our being together. We cannot be together unless you cease being objective. All your

attempts to be objective with your sweetheart and psychologize, is always a testimonial to your frustration. I mean, all people -- every prostitute in Paris will tell you this -- that all the men who are cowards psychologize and try to be objective about their own feelings. The lusty ones, they have no time for psychology, because psychology creates a break between the object and the subject. You try to observe yourself, and you try to observe the little girl, or whatever you do. Poor little girl, and poor bachelor, who you are then, you see. A man in love is not objective. You have to take your choice, gentlemen.

But you -- you boast that you can even be objective when you are love. Of course, it just means that you are not in love. And that from vanity, and impotency, and fear, and curiosity, and all the other influences on you -- you bury your birthright, and you become objective. Don't -- don't be interested in objectivity when you are in love, gentlemen. Lovers are much cleverer than objective people. They know much more. You know certain things when you are in love you will never know from objectivity.

Now to tell you the truth, gentlemen, we -- if we at this moment would not be able to be interested in the march of time through us, I could not teach this course. And the whole -- necessity then for you and me is only that we appear strung on one line -- I have chosen these words. I think they are quite apt. You are thrown into the future, and that is for a student the predominant situation. And I come from a large past. I have degrees, and titles, and what-not. I have learned something. Individually, this may not be true. Perhaps I have more of a future and you have more of a past than it seems at the surface. I don't know. I still think I have quite a future. But from my office, as a teacher in this college, and from your office as a student, it is obvious that you are more connected with the future, and I am more connected with the past. Isn't that true? Now, gentlemen, therefore when -- in getting together, we try to establish one channel of energy so that my relation to the past, and your relation to the future can be dovetailed, and can be gotten in such a position that the current can run from the times before me to the times after you. That's the problem, you see. Man, when he speaks, always tries to connect some time which I have not seen physically, and some time, you see, you have not yet lived physically. That is, gentlemen, the spirit of man only begins to work when your and my momentary existence are made subservient to a larger integration of the times. Before, it is quite unimportant what we say. We could also just point out things to each other. We wouldn't have to speak. But speech becomes necessary, you see, at the very moment when that which I have said may have to be said after I'm dead, you see, and after you're dead. And when it had to be said before I was born, before you were born, that has to be said in articulate language, because otherwise it cannot be repeated, you see. It cannot represent that which has to be said at all times.

Therefore, gentlemen, the Greek danger is the use of the word "object" and "subject," because it brings the stream of life to a standstill. The people who meet in the schools on these benches, and in front of a chair have ceased to live at that moment in their own estimation. They look at something else, at other people's living. And they therefore are in the terrible danger of unlearning the natural, you see, that at every one moment they are at a certain point in time. And that even if you look over the whole Museum of Natural History in New York and learn it all by heart, it only makes sense if you do something with it, and bring it back into the stream of time at one point -- all your knowledge, you see. And revamp all these objects -- objective facts, into an action of now, you see, of necessity, where it is necessary to know the thing, in order to solve your next problem.

So gentlemen, the whole Greek world is under the necessity of service, just as the report -- who -- you made -- gave the report, Mr. Martin, in your last sentence, you see?

Two things then I wanted to fight today, gentlemen: the plural, and the word "object." If you are aware of these two downfalls of your mind, you can begin to love -- live. In a preparatory and an entertainment state, you may be objective. But object -- to be objective is always a second-rate situation. It is always secondrate to be objective. We have to be objective, because there are so many secondrate situations. At this moment, you can't make a declaration of love. You can't go to war. You can't build a house. You can't do a great deal. Here you sit on your fannies so -- be objective, yes. But know that it is second-rate, that you are waiting for the moment where you can stop to be objective. It is not, gentlemen, that you -- we must argue against of being objective -- or being subjective, which wouldn't help at all -- but that you see the hierarchy, that the tribesman and the empire-builder and the Israelite, the priest of God Almighty come first; and that the Greek schools, and the Greeks epics, and the Greek theaters come second.

So in antiquity, gentlemen, what has been created are three full, real -- and real ways of life, and one that copes with the intermediary world of the co-existence of many.

What can we do for you?

[unintelligible]

You understand, gentlemen, after -- that after this had been done all over the globe, after there were either empires or tribes anywhere on the surface of the globe, that something new had to happen. Our era had to come which takes for granted one people lives in the eternal presence of the stars; one people live in

ancestor-worship with the totem pole always behind them, looking down on them; other people live in the messianic hope of prophecy; and then we have all the curious storytellers of Greece, and their -- with their objective gathering of facts. And who is man? Can he be either one of these four particles? Must he be either Jew or a Greek, or a Scythe, or an Egyptian? And the great yearning came, that the times might be full-filled, gentlemen.

You read in the "Letter to the Ephesians" of the New Testament that when the time was fulfilled, and the plentitude of the times were there, you read this with a pious misunderstanding. Sentimentality is always destructive of sobriety, and un-understanding. The whole Bible today is read by churchmen without the slightest understanding. But {of course}, it is dealing with something very practical, very real. It is dealing with you and me being able to be at the same time a tribesman, and an imperialist, and a prophet of God Almighty, and a student of science. Every one of us takes these privileges, gentlemen, that had to be produced. And it has been done in the last 2,000 years by what we call the Christian era. The Christian era is an attempt to make -- open up the four different ways of life to each other. That's Christianity and nothing else. Christianity is the way by which all the ways became open to each other, so that a man didn't have to stoop to one of these four ways exclusively, but could get the three other ways into his system, too. So that today, you don't have to be a Greek, but you go just to a liberal arts college and become a little bit of a student of the Greek mentality. That's all you do. But you are not one of these silly Greeks lingering in the city of Rome, the graeculi, the Greek servants there, you see, drunk with their rhetorics and their -- and their Greek language and going -- being good for nothing, and being despised by the Roman masters of the universe, who really rule and govern. You can rule, and become president, and read the Greek tragedy at the -- at the -- on the side.

This has been, gentlemen, the yearning of all the times, that man should be free to live in all times. And perhaps you begin to understand that all this, what you think fills history is not interesting. Neither the wars, nor the religions, nor the superstitions, nor the discoveries, nor the sciences, but the problem: how to be so free that when you -- ever you want, you can emphasize the past, you can emphasize the future, you can emphasize the present, and you can emphasize the Muses, the leisure, the getting-out of harness, the waiting, the entertainment, the intermediary period, you see, not now, not the time for decisions, you see, "let's wait and see."

And don't you think that is a tremendous task? Can you see -- understand now why the enemy of the understanding of time is what today is called "history." The history departments, gentlemen, are the one great obstacle to the understanding of the simplicity of history, because they deal objectively with any

number of different civilizations and orders. And they decline that in any one of these fields or times has ever been created on which you and I at this moment still depend. They tell you that -- Jeane d'Arc was burned at stake at 1430, was she? Or 1428 -- what year was it?

(1429, I believe.)

All right, it's a compromise. Good. Do you think it's true?

(I'm -- I'm almost positive about it ...)

Ja. See. So, we say what of it ...

(... I wouldn't stake my life on it.)

Would you please -- ? I didn't get it.

(Oh, I just -- I said I'm almost positive it was 1429, but I wouldn't want to stake my life on it.)

The Greek mind.

So gentlemen, we have to -- you have to split yourself into two people. The people -- the man of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, who says, as you say, "It's just one of those many facts about which you can be mistaken," and the other man says, "What do I need for my own life?" Now you will understand that the Jewish, or the Greek, or the Egyptian, or the family life is something you cannot wait to create yourself. You have to accept it. You have to be very grateful that there are still mothers and fathers at this moment, that you can go to Sharon and get married. All these forms are ready-made, are they not? They are held open for you. There they are. And you -- at the time -- when the time comes, you can say, "This is now for me." It's waiting for you. Then that's the real history of the -- mankind, all the ways of life waiting for -- to be fulfilled or chosen by you and selected. And woe to you if they aren't ready. For example, take a country in which you cannot become a monk, or a nun, or a priest, or a professor, because it's forbidden to become either one of them. Then you would neither be in -- in -- able to share the ways of the old Israel, or to share the ways of Greece, and because you couldn't become an actor, you couldn't become a professor, you couldn't become a monk, you couldn't sing the Psalms day and night. In any one of these ways, you are still able to find your own satisfaction today.

So gentlemen, this only deserves the name of history. History is not something that has gone by, but the things gone by are only important inasfar as they

helped or destroyed ways on which we depend at this moment, which we need for our own existence. History is very much alive as chemistry, gentlemen. What would you do without uranium {being here} -- doesn't help you to know in the abstract, but that -- {you're} meant to find it. And you have to use it.

But gentlemen, history are all the uraniums, yes, of the past 7,000 years created by human endeavor. Because what is uranium? Heaven brought down to earth. You know this word, "uranium." Uranus is Heaven. Uranium is something from Heaven brought down to earth. And I hope you begin to see now that this is not a myth, but that is very true what I have tried to tell you is that man one day began to speak, and he didn't before. And one day he tried -- organized the cosmic order and settled, and lived by the stars, and on the stars, and from the stars, and with the stars, you see. And one day he expected the ultimate goal of men -- all men under one god. And he began to do something about it. He left the fleshpots of Egypt. Gentlemen, that's history. History is only this which at this moment is still open to you and me, accessible. The rest is museum. What you call history doesn't -- isn't interesting. It's anecdote.

So gentlemen we need very little history, but we need one history. And all the histories which you receive today when you buy books have this tremendous criminal aspect, you see, of tempting you as though there were any number -- arbitrary number of history. You can either read the history of Babylon, or of the Aztecs, or of China, or of Egypt, or of Rome, gentlemen. But read one of them with the feeling that's your history. If you read all seven, you will probably, you see, be weakened, and get much less benefit from history than otherwise you could. If you study one of these great empires, you may be overawed by the discipline of these people and what they did in agriculture, and in building, and in skills, and in craftsmanship and so. If you read about all of them as you do, in the geographical magazine, on -- such other places, you say, "Oh, what of it? I have heard it all. One did this and the other this," and probably it's all equally boring, and equally indifferent. Gentlemen, do you see what multiplicity does to you at this moment? It ruins your sense of values. It ruins your sense of discipline. You don't have to know about all the civilizations on this earth. But you have to be very serious about one.

So let me give you now once more the skeleton of this course. We have dealt so far with antiquity, and we have divided it into four chapters, you remember. And we have said that in any one of these chapters, one thing is created, but with any number of varieties, of variations. That is, any one of these ways of life has 15 or 17 different forms. There are 100,000 tribes. If you understand what the tribe is, you don't have to learn all about the 100,000 tribes. A tribe is an institution to produce marriages. This is the center of the tribal system. You don't read it in any sociology. That's too simple, you see. They have to describe any given --

every different tribe as a different tribe, you see. It's utterly unimportant. That's not for you and me to know of every -- {after all, there are almost} 100,000 tribes. But in order to produce marriages, the people had to speak. They had to name people. They had to give them family names, you see, and names of their relations to each other. And in these names, they had to recognize each other, and to respect each other. And they had to put themselves under this name for a lifetime. And they had to listen to the man from the mask who appealed to their sense of honor and dignity under the name, and in the name in which they were addressed. And so we still today in the -- church have to pray "In the name of our Lord," because otherwise the people wouldn't know that they did pray in one spirit, and were in any way one family. But you -- nobody today seems in this country to understand why we praise the name. When I see -- look at these desperate ministers, they always fall asleep when they have to say that. They don't understand it anymore, because they no longer believe in the creation of histor- -- history. They think it's a formula. It is not a formula, gentlemen. As soon as this goes, the whole Church goes.

Now. So gentlemen, the -- the difficulty for you and me is to understand that one thing can be created in -- in many variations. A tribe is once created, and yet, because it is alive, it spreads into 100,000 different forms. An empire is created, and yet it can be found in different parts of the globe in various forms. Can you see this? Our history -- and that's what the Bible, the Old Testament tried to do -- is only interested in the creation of Adam, of Noah, Abraham and Moses, which is the tribe, and the empire, and Israel, you see. And the Greeks, of course, being contemporaries with the Israelitic venture, are omitted from the picture in the Old Testament.

So the Bible, gentlemen, is fully aware that there are many nations. But you can trace the meaning of the history of mankind by giving the typical history of one nation. So we have to avoid the -- the -- the -- the two extremes, gentlemen. We must not simplify history. No reason for this. Let it stand in all its wickedness and all its wastefulness. And we cannot get -- believe in the anarchy of history. It is not true that you and I can tolerate a history where for every town and every nation there is a different history. It's impossible. There's one history for all mankind, but innumerable diversifications of the same story. Can you get this point? This -- this via media -- via media as -- as Cardinal Newman would call it -- the -- road between two extremes, neither is every one fact, you see, done -- in- -- unconnected with every one other fact, nor is it so that there is one model tribe, and all the other tribes are not spontaneous, you see, or original; just as there is a family here and a family there, but the father there and the father here, you see, have to represent the same office. We are all accustomed to -- to acknowledge this in our own personal story, that my father and my relationship to my father, and your father and your relationship to him are different, and yet identical.

Both -- this has to be admitted. Can you see the difficulty, you see? You understand from your own experience what I say when I am talking about my father, and vice versa. So we interpret each other's different story by believing in the essential unity of the two. It's quite a big order, gentlemen, for you to understand. But it's the essence, today, by which we have to escape from your encyclopedic knowledge, and from the departments of history, and from all your errors that -- that is this -- is just an arbitrary number of facts, history. It's a very severe and simple order, and yet a tremendous underbrush and a tremendous diversification of branches, and twigs, and leaves, and birds on it. Can you see this? That this famous picture of the Tree of Life, gentlemen, of the Old Testament is very legitimate. The Tree of Life has many branches, yet every branch, as you know, repeats the shape of the whole tree; and every leaf on this branch repeats again the shape of the leaf -- of the -- of the branch. Very queer, this identity, you see, in shape. And yet, the difference in size.

Now what is left for us, gentlemen, is to see how these ways were open to each other. And by now you will understand, gentlemen, that every one of these forms had to take on a different shape by being open to the other way of life. Out of Israel the last form created in pre- -- in antiquity, there became the Church. The Church is the new Israel, even { }. Out of the sky-world of Egypt, the world of Heaven and earth became the new nature of today, the natural -- world of natural science, the universe.

Out of the tribes of mankind, gentlemen, there is at this moment not yet created, but bound to be created by your and my stupidity, effort, suffering, what -- what-not -- there is to be created something -- how do the socialists call it? -- the unity of society, the one great society.

So gentlemen, ever since the coming of Christ, the world has tried to transform the many tribes, the many empires, and the many chosen people, the many people who try -- thought they were called by God into oneness, open to all. You may say, gentlemen, that the society is a tribe of tribes, or it will not be the great society; that the universe is the world of worlds, of all possible divided worlds -- we'll illuminate this a little further, later -- and the Church is certainly the worshiping the God of all gods. Did away and {absorbed} all the gods. You have a strange -- or you can also call this here the people of people, but I prefer God of gods -- tribe of tribes, world of worlds, God of gods is the task of our own era, gentlemen, a very simple task, to make all the tribes, you see, recognize themselves as parts of one integrated tribe -- tribe to the second power, so to speak -- to make all the worlds over the different climates, the different earths, the different boundaries of empires, make them into one world. And to make the Church in which -- into a place in which all the names of Jupiter, and -- and Jehovah, can be all called forth as of one god to name, as participants of the one God of gods.

Gentlemen, the main point I today have to make in these last five minutes is -- here is no place at this moment for the Greeks. Let me put this in. The Greeks are as we -- I tried to tell you, the world of the mind, the ivory tower, the academic meditation, the leisure class. All this history of our era has been accompanied by schools, by scholasticism, by academic {trends}. And in my class or course, in Philosophy 10 I develop this behavior of the Greeks as concomitant with the three chapters of {real} history. At this moment, I wish not to say more about this. But I wish to draw your attention to one tremendous fact. If you look at this: we began the story of mankind with the tribe. We went on to the empire, and we went on to Israel. That is, Israel is the latest in antiquity, the latest in antiquity. Now gentlemen, that much you know of the history of the last 2,000 years: that the first events of our own era are the history of the Church. The second events are the history of the world. The discovery of America, for example, is a typical event of the second thousand years of our era, 1492. In -- at the same time, 492, in the first millennium, you get religious events: squabbles on the Creed in Constantinople. And then you get the -- Islam, you see, and you get all kind of religious warfare in the first thousand years. That is, gentlemen, the Church inherits Israel, the first form of the new era inherits the latest form of antiquity. The history of the world covers, by and large, the times from the Normans to today. Our Arctic Institute is one of the last attempts to find some part of the globe that could -- might still be discovered. It is not -- there isn't much left, obviously, you see. You now have to go and get into the stratosphere to make hay. But Mr. -- Admiral Byrd and Mr. Washburn, so to speak, are the latest Christoph Columbuses. And -- that is, they belong into a thousand years of world history; not Church history, but world history.

And the second millennium of our era then, gentlemen, is occupied all by -- or with the transformation of the many worlds, of the Chinese, and the Hindus, and the Mexicans into one world. That's the history of the last thousand years: how the world has become one. History of the first thousand years of our era: how the Church has become one. You understand? Now we are obviously, gentlemen, beginning a new chapter of unification, how the tribes might become one. We are now on the verge of beginning to create one great society. Most people in this country still think that society is a plural. You look in the telephone book and you find there's a society for cruelty against animals and then you find the society against cruelty for animals, and on it goes. That is, society is still treated in this country as an agreeable Greek plaything. You can have a society for anything, you see. Gentlemen, that's not what I mean. The society of which I -- we are going to see the birth throes at this moment, under which Communism is the great pioneer and herald, is one society all over the globe. One, and one only. Not many societies.

So the struggle is on today between the Greek societies, that are very cheap,

and the tremendous discipline, that it will take to work all over the earth together. You see it already coming, I mean, what discipline it would take. All our problems today are of this -- nature, you see. Take the -- take the uranium problem. It's a typical worldwide problem at this moment, you see. And oil is similar, you see. Wheat. All of these problems can no longer be regulated by any one part of the world.

So gentlemen, I have today tried to bring you to the point at which you understand where we at this moment are living. We are living after we have in two great millennia absorbed two great contributions of antiquity. Israel, the -- the belief in the free future, and the power of organizing society on one world into -- of organizing the world geographically, under all skies in all climates. We have not yet organized the division of labor, as in a tribe. The cooperation of all men in the intimacy and the integrated forms of one tribe. We have not yet created the tribe of tribes. We can therefore say by definition that in the year 1954, we look back at two achievements of the Christian era, and we look forward to that which has not yet been achieved. It would be quite erroneous if you would think that that history of the next thousand years would have the same theme, or the same topic as the history of the last 900 years, or the last 1900 years. In the year 300, the only interesting event was that Constantine became a Christian, because the history of the first thousand years of our era is the history of the gods, the many gods becoming all one God. The history of the last thousand years is what new continents, what new islands, what new rivers, what new mountains -- Mount Everest, you see? I forgot the Mount Everest. I mean, that's of course -- that's the great event here, at the coronation of Elizabeth, they -- that they climbed this last mountain, and acted in a truly, empire-like way. You see, that was for the Queen Elizabeth a good reminder that although she officially no longer is the empress of India, she still has an empire, and a good one, to rule.

And at this moment, gentlemen, then we have an orientation which the usual history cannot offer you. The orientation is that we live in the Christian era, and we live after the fulfillment of two chapters, and the beginning -- at the beginning of the third. The whole story of our era, gentlemen, is set off against antiquity. And again, our own moment is set off against the first two-thirds, so to speak, of the Christian era itself. Do you see it? And now ...

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