EDITORS' NOTE: The box of the original tape of this lecture is labeled "Cruciform Character of History" number 5. There seem to have been three formal "Tippett Lectures" at the University of the Pacific. Between the second and third, there also appears to have been a talk in a chapel. In our numbering, the third formal Tippett Lecture is Number 4. In its introduction, it is clearly described as the last lecture. However, the content of lecture number 5, as well as the labeling on its box (in Rosenstock-Huessy's handwriting), make it obvious that he viewed it as a fifth lecture in the series. The audio quality, as well as the delivery, suggest that it was not recorded as part of the original series, but done later at home or in a studio.

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You'll recall we began between Halloween and Labor Day, and that I fixed the time at which we were speaking at this millennium or these thousand years between 856, the day on which Halloween was instituted, for All Saints--by the Church--and Labor Day, which was started by an American group ca- -- who came to Paris in 1889 and tried to prevail on the European working man's movement that there should be a universal day for labor.

Why is this important, that we are quite clear about our own limitation in time that we speak in a certain moment of history ourselves? Inside history, we are dated. Most people think that when they talk about history they themselves are not in history. But at this point it will pay dividend that we already have spoken not of the Cross in general, but of gallow-beams, and no- -- therefore not in the pale manner in which the Enlightenment has talked down the Cross as a symbol, perhaps, as an abstraction.

Behind the spiral, already we discovered the organic serpent of the paradise story, lurking. Now, could it be that just as little as the spiral gives away the hollowness of her secret in her- -- itself--because we have to -- rediscover the organic model from which spiral is an abstraction, the serpent--could it be that behind the abstract term of the "cross" we find lurking the errors of western philosophy? This philosophy's idea of the cross is as unfounded as the spiral, and this I have now to explain.

About time and space, the last centuries have philosophized. There has been the great Kantian statement that time and space were the fundamental concepts of any thought--the shape, the form, the clothes, the dress--inside which all our thoughts had to appear. However, this philosopher, Kant, as well as all the others, chose to -- to talk of space and time in a singular.

Now, our debunking of this abstraction is very similar to the debunking

of the spiral, behind which we found the serpent lurking. Space and time never occur in the singular. It's a pretty stark lie to speak of space and to speak of time. When I describe a space, I'm myself not in it. There is always somebody, some mind, some thought outside looking at this space from the outside, objectifying it. Therefore, there must be two spaces. The singular space just does not exist. It is even worse with time -- time. To pretend that time can ever be known in the singular is one of these nice philosophical fictions by which the philosopher pretends that he is outside time himself, superior to all the events in time. But is he? Is his time not just as measured, and just as constituted as a limitation of his own existence as the time outside? Are we ever in one time without looking into another time? When I am speaking of the Middle Ages, does this not mean that I myself am im- -- at this very moment in the modern times, and look into the Middle Ages? Or I look into the future? Or I listen to the voices of the past? Whatever I do, time cannot be had without duplicity, without plural. The same, space.

And this is why the gallow-beams, the Cross of the genuine Christian tradition, have a tremendous value for reminding us of the inability of man to abstract from a crucial situation, from an ambiguous situation. I appear; and nobody at the first moment can tell--and I don't know myself--whether I'm to be treated as a member of the present society, as a member of the past society, as a member of the future society. If I am treated educationally, then I will be looked upon as somebody who may become somebody, but whose acts at this moment are not taken seriously. You may listen to me and say, "That's a study; that's an attempt of this young man--or this old man--to speak. He'd better learn a little better before he comes up again in public. He should have remained in his private brown study to prepare the -- his speech really a little more." Which means that my time is not recognized as present time, as arrived time, as acceptable time. It is time to be delayed, to be postponed, to be announced later. The same is of course true if I seem to be very obsolete, bygone, old, veteran, toothless, stammering, trembling, tottering to my grave, "he's a has-been." "He's a havebeen": that means that his time no longer has to be taken into account. His time has fallen into the abyss of the night of forgetfulness.

Once you see that times are always in the plural, you also see that you and I car- -- carry on our back this -- these gallow beams, which we call the Cross, in such a manner that it isn't -- not just one time for which we can be mistaken, or for which we can be judged; that -- that we have a claim to be seen in a threefold extension or expanse. We may be of the present. We may be of the future. We may be of the past. And you and I -- we ourselves -- must try to be the correct judges of this strange dilemma where we belong. Are we still welcome? Are we already bidden farewell? It's obscure.

Now this obscurity the philosopher denies. The last 200 years of Protestantism, of Enlightenment--I should better say, of philosophy--have very -- tried very hard to dislodge us from this rootedness in a living time, in an ambiguous time, in a time yet to be decided and yet to be created. And therefore, time seemed to be something that was quite clear: what was past was past, what was present was present, what was future was future. As though anybody knew. The most people around me I declare to be totally past, pass‚, bygone. But they don't admit it. And they make great trouble. They may execute me because I am a revolutionary. And I may then shout, "But you are obsolete. You are already dead."

But they answer, "We don't know this. We don't believe it. We think we are still up and com- -- coming."

Any innovation in this world consists of such a clash of the conviction of the next, that he is a next; and the conviction of the pre- -- of the bygone, that he is not bygone. How is this to be explained? How is this to be lived? How is time to be judged and to be adjudicated to the various people according to their merits? Well, here, the gallows, the cr- -- gallow beams of the Cross tell us the story that the contradiction is indispensable, that a man has to stand up and be counted and say, "The new times must arrive; they have arrived; they are to arrive." It's a clash. All recognition, all cognition, all our knowledge in human affairs is not to be had harmoniously. It is quite out of the question that we ever shall agree on when we live.

The date of history is a debatable date, and it is not debated in schools, in classrooms; that it is debated in battlefields, on battlefields. These battlefields may be of armies, they may be of barricades, they may be of vo- -- voting booths, but it is a total error to assume that there are no battlefields. Time can only be ordained and time is only constituted as a result of a victory after a conflict. All times exist only on the basis of such a conflict. And in order to create time, human hearts must be willing to -- fight it out, to be re- -- recognized for what they are worth. The moral equivalent of war, William James said in 1910, is inevitable and indispensable, because life cannot be constituted without such a decision between two different times, two different experiences of when we live. What is now, and what has been cannot be known. It can only be de- -- decided. And you and I live only as long as we are--well, let's say, on the side of the angels--that is, as we think we have heard the voice which tells us, "Now is the time." If they -- we haven't heard this voice at all, we don't live.

It is true, however, that between Halloween and Labor Day -- that is, for fully a thousand years, mankind had its battlefields and mankind had their victories and their defeats in the realm of the global expanse of the earth. You can say

that from the Normans, who went to Vinland via Greenland, via -- and over -- via Columbus, to the days of the conquering the -- South Pole and erecting the Russian and American camp at the South Pole, mankind has preferably expanded its knowledge of space. And the conquest of space has been the topic of world history between Halloween and Labor Day. And this is the reason, I think, why time has so -- been so misunderstood.

If you are an explorer, a geographer, a physicist, an -- administrator of space, of new provinces, of the -- global expanse of this earth--of Nova Scotia instead of Scotia, and New England instead of England--if this is the theme of the most important acts of your own biography, you will be inclined to say that mankind's history consists of the gaining of ground on this earth. And since space outweighed, in the experience of the last 1,000 years, the news about time, the neglect of our understanding of time is easily explained.

The event, the earthshaking event usually was in the last 900 years or thousand years, the gaining of new ground, or the uniting of new peoples, the founding of new cities, the naming of new rivers and new mountains. So space was of the essence. We can say that the millennium from 1000 to 2000 is filled specifically with the expanse of Christianity, of reading and writing, of knowledge, of manufacturing--certainly an expanse in space. It is so breathtaking -- if you think of our airlines that it -- is easily explained why people felt this was the foremost movement through time. And so all times seemed from this viewpoint to be filled with expanse. And the expanse goes in one direction: more, bigger, better, longer, greater distances.

So this I think explains our growing neglect, or our decreasing understanding of the mystery of times. Take the -- relation between the generations. The hurry with which we move through time makes it for the young man quite feasible to forget the greatest riddle of mankind is the peace between fathers and sons, and grandsons, and how this should be obtained or created that a grandson is even patient to continue what his father and grandfather have started.

If I look at the railroads in this country, it is a depressing sight that the greatest thing the grandfathers tried to create, the net of railways through this country, are of not the slightest interest to the public opinion formed by the hippies or formed by the beatniks. They don't care for this at all. They don't breathe in the magnanimity of those people, who in their little villages enabled the railroad to be built, by coming forward with great sacrifices, and allowing the railroad to build their railroad station in their village. This was a dream of an infinite future. And now this dream already belongs to the past. That's an unheard-of event. It's an acceleration, but it makes it understandable that these adventures through space have filled the imagination of all of us to such an

extent that the bleak idea, or the bleak necessity of understanding what it means that a grandfather and a grandson can tolerate--even love each other affectionately--that this secret is not discussed, is not debated, and to tell the truth, is not understood.

I had a discussion here, as a sequence of the last lecture, with a young man who is a minister's son. Now that is a hard situation; I understand that a minister's son must revolt, must rebel. But this man really denied to me that he had to know anything that people had known before him, that he had perhaps to join, or to ad- -- understand the great sentences of truth which have glued together mankind through 20, through 30, through 40 generations. When I tried to formulate a sentence that he could understand it, but without losing faith, without denying my loyalty to all our common ancestors, he got very angry and he said I had to speak a language which he could understand and it didn't matter that anybody before us would not understand the sentence. He mattered. The others did not matter. So he denies even the task. My task is, if I talk of time, to speak in such a way of the present, that my -- the first Adam and the last man would still be able to recognize of what I am talking.

This young man, and I think most hippies, and most beatniks, and most students, and most -- even philosophers, I'm afraid to say, are perfectly satisfied if they alone in their own moment of time can understand what I'm talking about. This is, however, for -- to me nothing. It is not satisfactory. It's not even truth if what I say can be understood by him and by nobody who lived 50 years earlier and by nobody who is going to live 50 years later. This is the riddle of speech, that the speech is a flow, is a stream, a river that must fertilize and wet all the -- banks of the river, whenever the water touches the ground. Every foot of this riverbank is a year of mankind. And the river, of course, must connect these various decades, years, centuries. And he must not form puddles, where every puddle is a -- left alone to itself and the whole country then at the end is one big quagmire, because the circulation of the speech is stopped, is not even intended, is not even hoped for.

I find that our modern speech moves in this direction: total indifference to the question, "Can this sentence be understood 100 years later or 100 years before?" But if it cannot, then language has been abused, because language is the connecting link between all the generations of men.

Today it is only the -- the link between the subscribers of a boulevard paper. Well, for this purpose neither printing nor writing would have -- had to be invented. You must -- understand that a newspaper can be replaced by sign language. A neon line -- light will do exactly the same. It can point out where you get your hamburgers. I read the sign, "Two and-a-half billion hamburgers

sold." Well, I envy the man who counted them. They'll nev- -- that's of course one big lie, the two and-a-half billion hamburgers, and that's what we today usually do when we try to say things in the -- in writing that shouldn't be put in writing. Two and-a-half billion -- million hamburgers obviously is an abuse of human writing, of human language. But it pays. And what pays seems to be -- to go today. It has nothing to do with truth. It has nothing to do with life. It has nothing to do with the future. And it certainly doesn't belong into history.

The Cross, however, taken as the gallow beams, as something not an ab- -- not abstract, but as something burdensome, expanded in space and in time...

[tape interruption]

The loss of the Crucifix in our common tradition in the churches, our preference for the abstract cross, and our final abstraction that time is one and space is one in a fictitious singular may be the bridge for a third millennium. It may be explicable why we had to go and dismiss the Old Testament notions about the gallow beams or original sin -- sin. Perhaps there is a great blessing in disguise in this transformation of our vocabulary. Just as I tried to tell you that after Halloween, mankind plunged for this great quest, this great crusade for space in Heaven on -- on earth--from the Norman -- Norsemen and the Crusaders, to the fliers in -- on Qantas--just the same way, perhaps, these last 200 years have prepared a new excursion which then will show the other beam of the cross in great clarity.

The -- eccentric fact about crucial thinking, about crucial living, is that they are -- irreconcilable in their directions by any logic. One beam of the cross and the other beam of the cross, they point forever in opposite directions. They always mean that somebody has done something, although it was not expected by him to do so; it was not natural. The cross saves our power to do the unexpected, to do something different, what an- -- from anything that the natural scientists, the -- physicists can derive from its -- his laws of gravity, of trends. Man is, thanks to the gallow beams which he can carry on his back, able to overthrow any trend.

And so I think that at this moment the singularity of space, the idea that we only gain ground by more and more in spatial expanse--getting richer, getting faster, getting around more definitely--may be s- -- relieved, may be replaced by the other aspect of the figure of the cross. May it not be that our speed itself forces us now from our hastening forward to reaching the other end of the globe in 10 minutes--by light, by signals, by what have you--that it must be -- opposed is perhaps the best way, really opposed by the opposite tendency of slowing down, of going behind even the measure of human marching and human living,

and becoming so slow that we can understand the slowness of our ancestors again and join the -- with the anthropologists the quiet pleasure of having endless time, of going backward into infinite times of the past. Not just dreaming, but trying to resume the rhythm, to resume the patience, to resume the slow beat of the human heart which, for the first time, is faced with the great task of coming to know some other man, of joining, so to speak, the first society on this earth by making peace.

Everything this momentary world -- world seems to be able to do, except concluding peace. Peace is something that you and I cannot be ma- -- do -- cannot do, cannot produce on the spur of the moment. Peace only occurs after you and I have forgotten our timepieces. Anybody who wants to know that peace can be made in 10 minutes will never know peace. The strange thing of peace is: it has as its condition your and my total indifference to time. Man steps out of time when he forgets that he is in a hurry -- that something has to be done within 24 hours or in -- within five minutes. Anything under the sword of Damocles called "watch," "schedule," is already poisoned with some element of struggle, of peacelessness.

The true peace of God passes all understanding for this one reason: that we people who want to understand want to know how we come out, when we can go home. In the peace of God, nobody goes ever home, because he is at home. The condition is that you start where you want to lead to. Anybody who is not at home in the divine mansions will never find this peace by some contraption.

The third millennium to -- into which we enter simply chronologically after Christ--it's very soon, 2,000 years--will have to oppose the quanta -- the quantities of the schedule of hours, and days, and years, and kilometers, and mileage by some realization that there is outside these measurements something that cannot be measured because it is the condition inside which we must live and breathe so that we may be able to measure. You must be out of breath if you always want to live with the quickest, the fastest, the latest news. And once you yourself are out of breath, time is lost on you and on ever -- whatever you undertake.

The beam of the cross, which in the last thousand years of the existence of man on this little globe--and I don't see how he could exist far longer than another thousand years--this beam of the cross for the last thousand years seems to me to go vertically into the ground of the beginnings. Man at this moment is desperately in need of connecting himself with the times when there was no timetable.

Time has to be tabled, if I may say so. It must be dismissed. The wave of

the future certainly is deprived of any future. We have -- overdone this in the last 100 years. "The wave of the future" has even been advertised. You know the famous book -- Madame Lindbergh, The Wave of the Future. Well, it was the beginning of fascism. It was the beginning of World War II. It was the beginning of all the misery that is now visiting us, because it was naive -- the naive faith that if you ran, ran, ran, you would arrive. The funny thing about man is that by running, he does not arrive. The runner must have a very stable home so that his running can make sense. And this, of course, was true of all the explorers. They had a place to go back to. There was a woman who waited for his return; and she was more important than the gentleman who explored and got the Nansen or Sverdrup Medal.

It is very strange that the -- that the crucial situation of men and women in all these last thousand years can be overlooked. One and the other belong to each other. One had to stay; the other could run. The fiction is in our history books that Mr. Nansen, or Mr. Sverdrup, or whoever the explorer is, did it all thems- -- by themselves. They could only do it because there were somebody who waited for their return. Without somebody waiting for my return, I cannot go out, because there is just nothing to return to. And this is so self- -- selfexplanatory that soldiers have never doubted that their -- their sweetheart at home had to wait for their return. And the soldier is nothing but the most explicit and most outspoken explorer of the universe. The -- in the soldier, all these things came to a -- come to -- and come to a head. The soldier cannot go to Vietnam unless he can return -- some form. He may not return in -- in the flesh. He may be killed. But then he wants to live on in the memory of those people who have not gone to Vietnam.

So what I try to say is that the overweight given to movement, the overweight given to spatial expansion in the last thousand years--from Greenland and Vinland to the South Pole--in our imagination, in our books, in our political theory, has never really been able to extirpate the other side of the cross. They are simultaneous. But I believe one thing. That the other side of the cross, the staying power of man, his power to stay -- at the beginning, and never forget that all the consequences--all these progresses, so-called--are still predicated on the existence of a root, of a beginning, of an initial paradise from which we start, that they would be doomed. It is impossible to go on in the direction of the one -- beam of the cross, just outside in space, just forward or backward in geographical expanse. Man is much more in a crucial situation than he cares to admit. The man who travels carries with him the other beam, the other -- of the -- the other side of his existence, "Where do you come from?" He's -- responsible just as much for the further existence of the place which he leaves than he is for the conquest of the place to which he wants to take us.

Once this is understood, the relations between the sides of this crucial life become more interesting than they are now. The relation to ancestors will become just as interesting as the relations to grandchildren. The relation to neighbors will become just as fantastically important as the relation to the Eskimos. And I think Alaska is really the last state which the Union could aggregate, could assimilate, could take in. It is more important to discover New York. That's an undiscovered island today. And it is in great danger of becoming as frozen out as Alaska is.

Thank you.

[tape interruption]

I promised to disclose the crucial structure of history.

We come from a time when time had no form, no shape. It was a line. I have told you all the abuses of historians of this very precious creation, this time -- God's time with man, God's time in man, God's time i- -- through His creation. I think you may see now that when I dated the middle part of our historical present between Halloween and Labor Day, I prepared the structure, the picture of the structure which now I think every one of you will be able to realize.

The Church came into this world saying that it was not of this world. The -- Church came from above. The arm of the cross that first became visible hung down from Heaven into a dark earth. And all of the fathers of the Church, all the missionaries were able to convince the people that they lived in darkness and that a new light was shining downward into this dark, leading them on, guiding them, giving them direction. We have not to give un- -- any of these pictures of Christmas, or of Easter, or of Pentecost, or of Halloween and All Saints; it is the superior light of the martyrs, the superior light of the man who went to the Cross without complaint in order to elucidate that on this earth, without the gallow beams on his back, man could not live as he was meant to live: in peace with the past and the future. The gallow beams of man, the cross on his back, appeared in the story of all the saints, and martyrs, and the Lord Himself, as the only way in which his momentary, day-by-day, ephemeral existence could be chained, could be connected with the way of the creator through the centuries and through the thousands of years. Without the gallow beams on His back, our Lord could never have interested anybody -- and he -- but He did fascinate men of all centuries, of all ages, in all districts of the earth, because He made visible whence they came and where they were meant to go. From the future and from the past of the human race shone a light into this rather silly existence of 30 or 70 years on this earth.

This ended the Church history of the first 1,000 years, the one you -- every one of us knows through the holidays--as I said, from Christmas and Easter Day to Halloween. The second phase illuminates the vast expanse of the earth, of the sky, of the heavens, of the waters, of the seas. Geography is, so to speak, the hunting ground of our maker in the second thousand years. We are placed in all directions to discover one more item of his deeds of his creatures, and organize them, and connect them and allow us to draw on them at any time we -- it pleases us. The second thousand years, therefore, illuminate the horizontal beams. They go everywhere--these people, these hunters, these navigators, these discoverers--and we are back of them. We are proud of them. We give their names to the countries we discover.

At this moment, nearing the year 3- -- 2000, the direction changes once more. The -- it's lunacy to get too excited over flying to the lu- -- moon. I think that will wear off. Just as it has worn off to become a martyr for the Christian faith. At one time people said it was wiser to populate the earth, and to go out into the land, and to plant woods and forests, and navigate the seven seas, instead of burning your body and castigate it. But at one time, it had been very necessary, before. So there was a change in direction around the year 1000, between the vertical direction from above into the horizontal direction all over the globe.

What I have tried to prepare you for and to sow into you as a potential future for our race is the necessity to change the direction once more. The geographical expanse, let it be. It will go on. And all the investment there need not be jeopardized or jettisoned. But we will not have peace; we will not have offspring; we will have famine, and disease, and rebellion, and --; fecundity will disappear from this globe unless man begins to approfondir, the French would say, to deepen again the origins -- the restful, pacific origins in which man in endless time, opening his eyes to his creator, in great wonder that he was there at all, not asking for his own aims, but trying to discover the aim of his creator in creating him, the little human. At this moment, where the Great Society knocks at the door, we must make peace with people of other creeds, with people of other races, with people certainly of other idioms, and other religions. And a new pluralism makes its entrance which is conditioned on our having infinite time. You cannot explain the third millennium by the timetables of the Southern Pacific, or of the -- United Airlines. You can only believe in any future on this globe for mankind if people have so much faith and so much good will that they do not count the hours for their arrival, but that they do -- are not in a hurry to depart.

I could give you chapter and verse on the little steps in my own existence which have led me to practice what I here think I can see and perceive as hap-

pening in all people of good will. You see many people retiring before they have to retire. You see many people slowing down, cutting down on their possible movements of speed. Any one of these people is already leaving the horizontal beam of the cross which -- that which cultivates the expanse in space. He is already leaving this, and cultivating, and rooting himself in eternity, in the length of time, in the endlessness of time.

And this is, I -- I feel, the simplest way in which I can make you see that the cross is much more than a symbol, as they -- like to call it. It is the clearest expression of our march through our own strange jungle of ignorance and misunderstanding. We ourselves have first to learn that we stem from above, that a seed has been put into us which demands incarnation, that then we are entitled to lusty, adventurous life all around, but that we miss the bus, and we miss our goal if in the speed with which we move we feel bliss. This is not the end. The end is the domination of all schedules, the play with all speed, all quickness, all efficiency. Man is not made to be efficient. He just may be sides -- that's a side issue, the horizontal one. The deepest one, the profoundest one, is our entering the secret of the rest of the creatures. They are from the beginning to the end without time. They are there.