“Speech is a Continuum”

name and calling. A name is a gift given at birth, but also an award made when the call comes to us, and an obligation on whatever path that call sheds its light. Names combine life, vision, and actions in our transformation. The trinity in which we stand becomes simplicity through the name we bear, which also bears us up. Jesus’ life defies biographical reasoning. His teaching defies the textbooks of morality. His actions entered world history as a foreign body. 3

ancestors.Together, amidst the First World War, they would engage in a fierce dialogue about their respective faiths. 2 Rosenstock-Huessy left Germany immediately upon Hitler's coming to power, though he briefly returned to Berlin to help launch and contribute to the edition of Rosenzweig's letters, which contained their correspondence.
The political scientist Carl Friedrich helped secure him a position at Harvard, though his insistence on talking about God in the classroom as a living creator and indispensable power in life did not go down well with some members of the History department, and especially with its head, Craig Brinton.Brinton, like Rosenstock-Huessy, had also written a major study of revolutions-and their respective reviews indicate their mutual contempt for how each saw the other's understanding not only of revolutions but of history and its role in our lives.
In 1935 Rosenstock-Huessy then moved out into the boondocks of Dartmouth where he taught social philosophy to undergraduates.While other émigrés, such as Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, Paul Tillich, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and many others, became important parts of the intellectual landscape of the post-World War II period, Rosenstock-Huessy remained pretty well anonymous in the United States, though after WWII he returned regularly to lecture in Germany and his works continued to be reviewed there.However, the impression he made upon his students was great, and a number of them were determined to ensure his writings would survive in one form or another.One of his students, Russ Keep, lugged a gigantic tape recorder into his classes over a number of years to capture his lectures, which, with their lack of textbooks and the usual paraphernalia of an undergraduate program, were unlike anything being taught anywhere else in the country.Another of his students, Clinton Gardner, set up a press for Rosenstock-Huessy's works that were either out of print or as yet unpublished.While yet another, Harold Stahmer, who had a teaching position in Columbia and then at the University of Florida, urged more prestigious publishers to keep his writing in print, while also writing introductions to them.In sum, his works are mainly available today thanks to the efforts of former students and family members, as is the case with this book, which is edited by his grandson, Raymond Huessy.I mention all of this because Rosenstock-Huessy's writing is less on philosophical ideas and their internal consistency and coherence, than on how life, teaching and action work together (the ICHTHYS essays, which I briefly discuss below), and on the responsiveness of those who are addressed and feel inspired to act in solidarity.
The Fruit of Our Lips is a new edition of The Fruit of Lips Or Why Four Gospels, originally published for the Pittsburgh Theological Monograph series by the Pickwick Press in 1978 and edited by Marion Battles.Battles's edition was a translation of the essay that had originally been written in 1954 as "The Fruit of Our Lips," and then in a revised version as the concluding essay of Rosenstock-Huessy's two-volume work of 1964, Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts, and then, once more, as the last of three essays in German in 1968, in "Die Unwandlung des Wortes Gottes in die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts" (which also provides the subtitle of the edition).All of which are included in this new edition, along with a brilliant Introduction, the original handwritten 1954 version, two letters (one to Rosenzweig's mother Adele), Battles's introduction, and various other relevant notes and unpublished pieces, as well as scholarly notes plotting some of the materials Rosenstock-Huessy alludes to or argues with.
I have known Ray Huessy for almost thirty years, and he had been sending me drafts of this work ever since he started it, commencing with the essay "ICHTHYS" (from the Greek for fish, and its Christian symbolism based on the four Greek initials for Jesus, Christ, Son of God, Savior), two versions of which are included in this volume.But my enthusiasm for this edition has nothing to do with this and everything to do with this being my favourite work by Rosenstock-Huessy and my appreciation for Ray's efforts in editing a work that required an enormous amount of detective work to fathom the influences and historical theological nuances that flow into the book that is just as likely to be "offensive" to non-Christians who will baulk at the idea that the Christian era has been the most decisive event in the history of humankind, and to Christian theologians and biblical critics who will baulk at his wholesale rejection of the "discoveries" and consensuses about the relationship between the Synoptic Gospels and John.
"ICHTHYS" was originally conceived as a rejoinder and commentary on the last two words (i.e., "into Life") of Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption.It also serves as a valuable introduction to the Fruit of Our Lips.It argues that life, teaching and action are phases that mean nothing in isolation, and hence if treated as self-contained their meaning would be completely distorted.For Rosenstock-Huessy, the importance of this sequence is pivotal in the founding of the Christian era, for it requires each of us to live a life that bears fruit just as we are the fruit of the trinity of life, teaching, and action.In this respect, the trinity is not an abstract way of depicting God's nature, but as Rosenstock-Huessy says in the final sentences of the 1927 version, "the three breaths of the divine Creator, Revealer, Redeemer are reflected in the image of the threefold God in life, teaching, and action.Creature of the Father, Brother of the Son, Collaborator in the Kingdom-that is the trinity in us" (146).A little earlier he wrote: The only reason we can walk humbly is that God has commanded us to do so not only in a human way, but by name; for everything God has to say, he says in the names that his sons then bear before mankind until their influence is extinguished.From the first day on, our name waits to see whether God will make our life one of name and calling.A name is a gift given at birth, but also an award made when the call comes to us, and an obligation on whatever path that call sheds its light.Names combine life, vision, and actions in our transformation.The trinity in which we stand becomes simplicity through the name we bear, which also bears us up.Jesus' life defies biographical reasoning.His teaching defies the textbooks of morality.His actions entered world history as a foreign body. 3om Rosenstock-Huessy's position, then, the decision Rosenzweig had made by remaining true to the worship of his ancestors was based upon a failure to grasp that once a new partition of time arises there is no way to escape its eventfulness. 4vents derive from calls and responsive actions and are furnaces of new names and human coining-perhaps none has taken the "word being flesh" as literally as Rosenstock-Huessy; thus our character and our collective destiny are bound up with the commands, expectations, priorities, roles and tasks that prepare us for life.In The Fruit of Our Lips Rosenstock-Huessy declares that his work is built upon "one dogma that speech is a continuum" (emphasis in the original).Speech is the source of what and who we are, of our achievements and ruins-our conscious and unconscious, our memories of the past, our participation in the present, and our hopes for the future.We may speak different languages from our neighbours, but that we speak is what binds and divides, what enables us to declare war, or create a new peace.
Social formations are therefore our words made flesh, words becoming worlds.We are all formed by and through names-some names are pregnant with hope and expectation or honour and affirm a tradition.Names may be venerable or antipathetical, they may call us to act, or bestow honour or shame upon us.Each role, each office, each duty we take on ourselves is but part of a massive process that exists only because we speak, because our loves, hates, fears, panics, expectations, are expressed aloud, are heeded and acted upon, or transgressed and rebelled against.Further, how our name figures in the greater constellation of those whose lives our actions affect; our lives do not simply belong to us and may, if significant enough, bind us across the times.For Rosenstock-Huessy, since we speak in time, as we respond to events, circumstances, and crises that require us to speak up, we become creatures of time, which is to say that, just as the world is constituted by a plurality of persons, groups, and communities, it is also constituted by a plurality of times. 5And the conflicts between peoples was often a conflict of the times, at least to the extent that they were not solely driven by resource scarcity but were over questions of faith.Just as worlds are expressions of names, names themselves are indications of faith.This is also why he argued that Christianity is an attempt to bring the plurality of times into a common time.This is a recurrent theme throughout his writings and is central to the Fruit of Our Lips.The case, though, is made far more elaborately in his two-volume magnum opus that he laboured on for fifty years, Soziologie, republished more recently under the title originally intended by Rosenstock-Huessy as a three-volume edition, Im Kreuz der Wirklichkeit: Eine nachgoethische Soziologie (In the Cross of Reality: A Post-GoetheanSociology). 6 Rosenstock-Huessy insisted that he was a Christian thinker because he saw that it was Christianity that initially laid down the major challenge from which we cannot escape: that after two world wars we are forced to inhabit one planet and to live together as neighbours.He expressed that challenge also as the task of making contemporaries of distemporaries, which requires us to be open to new pathways of solidarity, pathways which in turn require an understanding of how we've arrived where we are.Although he often stated that we live in a post-Christian era and that the most apt way to live a Christian life was to live it incognito, his entire life as a teacher-whilst ranging over many disciplines, he could not be classified under any one of them-was dedicated to a single task: to show the people of the West, who have forgotten where they came from, how they came to be, and why we now live in "one world."Thus it was that Rosenstock-Huessy devoted much of his work to the study of the genesis and interconnections between the Western revolutions and their role in leading up to the world wars.Those revolutions themselves, though, had as their preconditions the cultural unity predicated upon the messianic orientation to life provided by the Christian Church.Like Rosenzweig he believed that Christianity had a Jewish core, and that Jews and Christians were mutually dependent and inimical "friends" on the common front of the real that takes redemption/salvation as its task.While the Church had as its precondition the social formations ("speech-ways" and bodies of time, in his terms) of antiquity, which all crossed paths in the Roman empire, and were to be reconfigured through their Christianisation.
The Fruit of Out Lips takes off from the greater inventory Rosenstock-Huessy identified as the universal achievements of the four great ancient social formations in Die Vollzahl der Zeiten (The Full Complement of the Times), the second volume of his Soziologie (Im Kreuz der Wirklichkeit/In the Cross of Reality).These four were tribes, empires, Greek citystates, and the Israelite experience as the people of exile, covenant and prophesy, each of which had reached a crisis point.Jesus, he argued, was the great respondent to these crises, a culmination but also a beginning: "All mankind," he asserts, "took part in the emergence of this one man" (45).Contingencies of social bodies, which had been fortified against each other in their origins, had gradually seeped into each other historically in ancient Palestine, to which Jesus had responded: All these last things could until then only have meant the end of the world, and Jesus was in fact the end of our first world.He took the sins of this first world upon himself.This sentence simply recognizes the fact that in separation, tribal ritual, the temple of the sky-world, poetry in praise of nature, and the messianic psalms, were all dead ends, {in the immutability of their one-sided tendency}.In this sense Jesus' death sentence was the price of his being the heir of these fatal dead-ends.They slew him because he held all their wealth and riches in his hand, heart, mind, and soul.He was too rich not to share in the catastrophe of the all-too-rich ancient world.{So it was his duty to be the one condemned by the king, the one sacrificed by the priest, the poem of the poet, and the one foretold by the prophet.}(41) 7 In what follows, I attempt to summarize Rosenstock-Hussey's major claims.One of them is that Christianity appears when the forces of antiquity had become dead spiritual ends, that is, they had yielded the fruits that their foundings had cultivated, but they had become obstacles to making a better future (i.e., one in which the plenitude of human powers could be better accessed and cultivated).In this respect, he also claimed that any attempts to try and restore the ancient Christian versions of speech-ways and social formations were doomed to fail, for the way back is blocked by the cross: I may not relapse into tribal ritual or Pharaoh's sky-world; Hitler, who tried to do just that, stands revealed as a madman.The other streams are similarly blocked: the modern Greeks, the physicists, and the modern Jews, the Zionists, are certainly not the Greeks or Jews of antiquity.The Greeks glorified the beauty of the universe; our physicists empty it of meaning.The Jews praised God; the Zionists raised a university as the first public building in Jerusalem.So the roadblock of the Word is simply a fact; not one of the streams of the speech of ancient men surges through us directly any more.(45) The other major theme of the book centres on the Gospels, which "are the lips whose fruit we are expected to be, and that they are his lips" (46).This involves Rosenstock-Huessy in a dense and elaborate argument about the special significance of each of the Gospels, their connection to each other, and their collective accomplishment.His reading of them is as historically "orthodox' as it is contrary to the consensuses that dominate biblical criticism today.He makes no apologies for not adhering to what he sees as a travesty of interpretation due to the scholarly dependency on "the naturalistic dogmas" that have overtaken biblical criticism since the nineteenth century.These dogmas include the order, dating, and authorship of the Gospels, and the claim that the Gospel of John stands apart, that its author is not John of Patmos, and that there is a common source of the Synoptic Gospels ("the famous 'Q'"), which require discarding four facts: (1) John writes as an eye-witness who knows the minutest details when he cares to mention them.The apostle is the author of the gospel, and that is why it carries authority.
(2) All four gospels are apostolic.Matthew was the converted publican {among the apostles}, and he wrote under the eyes of {Peter and the sons of Zebedee and} Jesus' brother in Jerusalem before the year 42.Mark obeyed Peter.Luke lived with Paul.John dictated to a Greek secretary.
(3) Matthew wrote in Hebrew, not in Aramaic, and he was the first to write.
(4) Mark states bluntly that he is quoting Matthew.( 47) While much of The Fruit of Our Lips is dedicated to arguing from, and on behalf of, these "facts," what is no less important is how he develops the point raised earlier about incarnation in "ICHTHYS" that the writers of the Gospels are in agreement: speaking and writing must undergo a change, because both have in fact been changed by the Word.If all four are not lying, their own speech and writing must bear evidence of this alleged change.If we could prove that their speech is different, and discover how it is different from everything that had been said before, the change of which they hope to convince us and the change that speech underwent in their gospels will have to be one and the same."Conversion," "faith," "salvation," "revelation," "speaking in tongues," "outpouring of the Holy Spirit"-all these nearly dead expressions would have to agree with the process that can be observed in the texts of their gospels.( 52) The discussion of and the emphasis each Gospel discloses by the effects the life and teachings of Jesus had upon their own respective actions is the "Fruit of Our Lips."For Rosenstock-Huessy, it is the change of life, the dispensing of one form of life for another, and what we do with our lives for others because of that rebirth that is the great truth; that is, that life is not simply "taught" by Jesus but is incarnated through the lives of those who knelt at the cross: "All four gospels are processes in which the four Evangelists lay down their human limitations at the foot of the cross and transform their individual experience into a contribution to the community" ( 67).(This is also his central answer to Rosenzweig.)It is not that this never happened before.On the contrary, what is being revealed is a law of life that has been there from the beginning; yet what makes all the difference is in recognizing how this figures in life, how it is a command for all to do likewise.It is not a promise of happiness, on the contrary, but happiness has never been a promise of life, in spite of the enthusiasm of enlightened men who drew up the American Declaration, but is a way in which life is not defeated by death.For it was Christ's death that was the proof of how his actions continued far beyond his death.The careful reader might pick up here that Rosenstock-Huessy's interpretation of Christianity is one which eschews any Platonic residuals and deference to an "afterworld."Rosenstock-Huessy thinks that the idea of the soul living after death in the way that has become commonplace is not what Jesus or, more generally, the Bible teaches, which is also why he is no more popular with Christians than he is with secular thinkers.Christianity, for Rosenstock-Huessy, is not a way of life that hungers for timelessness, for death, but which attunes the importance of action to the time in which it is initiated as well as to the times that it spawns, and which factors death into the action (rather than its avoidance): Jesus lives because he has died-he is, what Rosenstock-Huessy calls the "speaking victim." 8Acting and thinking in this way reverses traditional priorities.Yet it is also the case that all societies require sacrifice and heroes who are prepared to die so that others live.Christianity, as Rosenstock-Huessy sees it at least, does not refute this aspect of social existence, but extends the task of community building to all the living and to all generations to come.This also means not being beholden to the spirits or gods of the tribe, the empire, the arts and sciences (the Greeks), or even the law itself (the Jews).Christianity is, in other words, a life lived in promise to freedom-not the freedom pursued by moderns (or pagans) to submit to one's appetites, nor to make idols of reason and ethical and legal abstractions (the "moral law within me") or the state itself, but the freedom to break out of the cycles that demand our submission.Thus Rosenstock-Huessy emphasises that Jesus was not one thing, he was always something more than the roles traditionally allotted to what someone may be.So "Because they only knew the types of men who had lived before him, they called him: Joseph 's son,  carpenter, king, priest, rabbi, prophet, and messiah" (41).Indeed, for Rosenstock-Huessy, therein lies the secret of Jesus' divine nature: the founder who opens a path for all to follow so that they may follow wherever the spirit leads, dying from old forms of life into new ones.
For Rosenstock-Huessy, our freedom is not to be found in the answers provided by philosophers who play the will against determinations, 9 or some kind of Spinozian viceversa, or our appetites against rules and laws (de Sade and the antinomian phase of the post-structuralists), and vice-versa (Kantian type morality).All such claims carry within them the philosophical conceit of us making ourselves, as if the weight of the dead and the call of the yet to be born are insignificant.The secret of freedom, for Rosenstock-Huessy, is to be found in our capacity to partition and thus open new pathways of time.And this has been the truth revealed by Christianity-the inner nature of creation.There has been no shortage of foundings undertaken by various respondents to circumstances, and the modern tendency to voluntarism may make us believe that we are capable of constructing anything we will.Rosenstock-Huessy's point, though, is not merely about the freedom to will, but the importance of acting at the right time, of opening up avenues of faith, when the time is right and with the right spirit, or what he calls the Holy Spirit, something beyond our control, which makes use of us, but which is not beholden to preexisting laws, because it moves beyond the determinations ("the cycles of life") we are familiar with, and generates futures driven by faith, hope and love, rather than clear ideas, or first principles.
A key claim in The Fruits of Our Lips is that each author of the Gospels is targeting a group suffering from a particular "disease" due to being caught up in the cycle of life, and hence the importance of the Gospels is not appreciated unless one fathoms the collective task that is being undertaken, with each author commencing his Gospel where the previous one had left off.It is a task that requires appreciating how each author refracts the life, teachings and actions of Jesus to show a new way of life that has been opened into the future. 10Thus he works back from John, the last Gospel, to Matthew, the first: John spoke to people who knew the arts and sciences; Luke spoke to the greatest high churchmen and Puritans of antiquity; Mark spoke to the civilized inhabitants of the temple states.But thanks to his "bad taste," Matthew penetrated to the most archaic layer of all society, to the tribal layer of ritual, and so Matthew gave us a version of the gospel that was to become the most universal and fundamental characteristic of the new way of life.The Mass and the Eucharist, the inner core of all worship, is identified in Matthew [26:26-29].Since he made clear that by His sacrifice Christ had purchased the salvation of the sacrificers, the scripture now says: At every meal, the sacrifice that is the bread and wine speaks to the dining community and invites us to join our Master on the other side, so to speak-on the side of the victim.(92-93)  And then continues: These were the four glad tidings: that a sacrificial victim might speak; that the heart of the world that might be created by response; that God's "no" might be transformed into a healing medicine of suffering on the road to a new incarnation; and that the human soul might be acknowledged as God's newest poem.The blind alleys of tribal ritual, of temple cult, of Israel, and of Greece were opened up to one another.The four Evangelists succeeded because they were each immune to the specific disease that their tidings swept away. . . .John, the prophetic one, did not write for the Jews, nor did the doctor Luke write for the Greeks {it was the other way around.Fed on the prophets, John overcomes the Greek muses, and the academic doctor, Luke, overcomes the scribes.}The fisherman Peter preaches to overcome the priestly-astrological world, and it is no man of good taste and good standing who surpasses the Old Testament in the first gospel, but the completely unrespectable publican.( 95) Finally, Ray Huessy has done marvellous detective work in tracking down various passages and sources that help orientate the reader in what may seem an outrageous reading of the Gospels and how they form a circle, acting in concert to create a new world which is forever required to reinvent the dwelling places of the spirit if we are to survive and live well.

Notes
1. Rosenzweig, "The New Thinking," 127.And "I don't learn from anyone as naturally or genuinely as significantly, without the addition of my own eagerness to learn, as I do from you." Rosenzweig to Rosenstock, 4.10.1929, in "'Not Chosen, But Laid  as overturning the "natural order."9. Though not much read today, Fichte's philosophical influence in the early part of the nineteenth century should not be underestimated in articulating a rights'-based view of life dependent upon voluntarist selves.10.Rosenstock-Hussey thus concurs with John Chapman's sequencing of the Gospels which also follows the earliest tradition of the Church.
Me By God,'" 1282 (my translation).Rosenstock-Huessy would say the same, even going so far as to call his own Sociology a popularised Christian version of Rosenzweig's Star ofRedemption (published in 1921): Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Margit Huessy 1.11.1924, in ibid., 103. 2. Rosenstock-Huessy's ancestors were also Jews, though they had lost all vestiges of their tradition.See their wartime correspondence in Judaism Despite Christianity, and essays about their correspondence by Alexander Altmann and Dorothy Emmet.3. The phrase "humbly walk" is a reference to the closing words of Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption. 4. For his part, Rosenzweig had said that Christianity was based upon a "lie."See "Brief an Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy am 2 Juli, 1919."https://www.erhfund.org/wp-content/uploads/NOT-CHOSEN-1919.pdf.Accessed July 27, 2023. 5. Rosenstock-Huessy's criticism of linguists and most language philosophers was that they failed to differentiate between significant and insignificant speech.6.The first volume was published in English in 2017 as In the Cross of Reality, Volume 1: The Hegemony of Spaces.7. Raymond Huessy uses French brackets to indicate Rosenstock-Huessy's additions of 1964 to the original 1954 text of The Fruit of Our Lips.8. Like René Girard, Rosenstock-Huessy sees how Christianity construes victimhood and sacrifice