Rosenstock-Huessy Returns...

By Jeffrey Hart | Saturday, October 4, 2008

...Not that one of the most influential professors ever to teach at Dartmouth ever really left. His influence remained among the many alumni whose lives he changed since arriving at Dartmouth in 1935 as one of the large numbers of German émigrés who added so much to American culture.

Rosenstock, as we called him, made me take Christianity seriously for the first time. Both of my parents were Catholics, my mother remaining loyal to the Church, but my father (Dartmouth ’21), though he went to a Catholic prep school, thought the whole thing was a lot of nonsense. He mocked the Latin of the Mass as “I can beat you playing dominoes.” Coming to Dartmouth as an undergraduate, I had no religious education at all and did not go to church.

Let us pause for a moment over my statement that Rosenstock made me take Christianity seriously for the first time. Two great events have de-railed religion as formative to our culture: the Reformation brought sectarianism and pluralism to our culture, and the Enlightenment brought critical thinking, and the rationalism of science, to it.

When I arrived at Dartmouth from New York’s Stuyvesant High School—which was strong on science— in the Fall of 1946, I was a naturalist in two senses of that word.

First, I was an amateur herpetologist, a student of reptiles, amphibians, snakes, turtles, frogs, salamanders. It was fascinating to me that these marvelous creatures possessed consciousness while their view of the world had to be profoundly different from ours. Second, I was a naturalist in the philosophical sense. That is, the whole of actuality is comprehended by the word Nature. The philosophical expression of naturalism is empiricism: measurable fact plus analysis.

During my sophomore year I roomed in 403 Wheeler, and the fourth floor of Wheeler Hall at that time was a lively, even dangerous, mixture of veterans and young men from secondary schools. One veteran had a small leather bag full of Japanese gold teeth. Another man had kept his service revolver with which he shot beer cans off a waste basket. A couple of veterans were drunk most of the time. But among serious students there was much talk about Rosenstock-Huessy. Marshall Cohen, who lived on the fourth floor, was a philosophy major and later became a distinguished professor of philosophy, called Rosenstock “a beautiful man,” as indeed he was, as photographs of him attest. Cohen was also enthusiastic about T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, a theological poem centered on the moment in-and-out of time, a moment Eliot called “incarnation.” Christianity was very much in the intellectual air between 1945 and 1960, with Eliot to be sure, but also with C.S. Lewis, Graham Green, and Evelyn Waugh. So of course I signed up for Rosenstock’s philosophy course, which he conducted in the large lecture room on the second floor of Dartmouth Hall. The principal text was Rosenstock’s The Christian Future, or The Modern Mind Outrun—an aggressive title indeed—supplemented by his The Multiformity of Man.

Rosenstock looked exactly like what in fact he had been, a German officer who had been in the Kaiser’s army and had fought at the ghastly battle of Verdun. He had a stocky build, white hair and, as Cohen had said, a beautiful face. You could imagine him in one of those old spiked helmets the Germans wore in the Great War, as it was known several wars ago.

His lectures were really one-sided conversations which he conducted with himself, often starting with an item from the day’s newspaper. He was much indebted both to William James and Nietzsche. He saw Nietzsche as a prophet who had foreseen our century of wars and revolutions. Rosenstock would say, “Gentlemen”—he often began that way—“Gentlemen, we would be out of luck if Marx had been the only prophet to understand the future, but we do have Nietzsche on the side of freedom.” He saw the connection between William James and Nietzsche in the importance they placed on the Will. “Gentlemen, without will you are an earthworm.” Rosenstock might have mentioned the metaphysical horror Nietzsche expressed at the “death” —“murder”—of God. In that Nietzsche anticipated Dostoevsky and Kafka.

Rosenstock subverted my naturalism/empiricism with an existential argument. Karl Jaspers defined existentialism as “philosophizing where you stand.” Rosenstock argued that empiricism is useless in making many important decisions since the future is not yet a fact. You project hope forward, where it cannot be verified. He cited Robert Frost’s famous poem “The Road Not Taken” as an illustration of the element of tragedy in every choice. The tragedy of “The Road Not Taken” is the road not taken. If you decide to become a physician, the possibility of becoming a diplomat may die. Choice itself involves an element of faith.

Rosenstock could also be German-authoritarian. One day in class a friend of mine named Bill Krauss raised his hand and said, “Professor, don’t you think it would be more intellectually respectable if you offered proof for the existence of God?” Rosenstock hurried down the aisle, grabbed Krauss under the arms and lifted him out of his seat. “Pig, you don’t deserve to live,” he snarled, “Do you think you made all this?” Then he plopped Krauss back down in his seat. A memorable moment, if not exactly a syllogism.

Rosenstock had an existential moment during the battle of Verdun during which tens of thousands of men were killed. During a lull in the fighting he wandered out into no man’s land, and when the artillery started firing again he took refuge in a crater. There, in the midst of the bombardment, he said, he felt like a “naked worm,” cut off from history, cut off from everything. A nation ignorant of history, he said, is like a man without memory, all identity lost. Therefore, “History must be told.” And so we have his important work Out of Revolution, which recounts the transformative events that have shaped Western mankind. Rosenstock spoke of the Age of the Father, the Age of the Son and the coming age of the Holy Spirit in that book.

I have trouble defining what Rosenstock teaches regarding the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the central event of Christianity. In The Christian Future, he argues that the continuing life of the Church as the Body of Christ “is as essential a daily proof of his Resurrection as the Easter event itself.” But what are we to think of “the Easter event”? Rosenstock gives remarkably little space to the central “Easter event” of Christianity, but this marginalizes what is central to Christianity. In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul said emphatically:

“For what I received I passed on to you as of the first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James and all of the apostles. ...And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. ...If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.”

That offers empirical evidence for the fact of the Resurrection and certainly sets forth what Christians believed from the beginning, and also what Paul spoke about in Athens at the Areopagus.

My guess is that for Rosenstock, the Resurrection is primarily an existential experience, an occurrence in the individual soul that lifts the individual out of despair. But do I hear him saying to me, “Pig, you don’t deserve to live”? However that may be, I understand that Rosenstock late in life considered becoming a Catholic, which of course insists on the historicity of the Resurrection, but was dissuaded by his wife.

I myself became a Catholic in 1968, after much reflection. Here the Apostles’ Creed deserves prolonged consideration, and I think it is evidential. In some form, probably a baptismal rite, it dates back to the first century, and I think the elements of the creed there are basic if the Resurrection actually happened. The Apostles’ Creed took ten centuries to reach final form. In Why I Am a Catholic Garry Wills says that the Apostles’ Creed is the basis for his Catholicism. Catholicism is creedal and defines belief, in that much to be preferred to emotion based evangelical “awakenings,” the third of which we are now experiencing with disastrous results.

Now, however, I maintain a critical distance from Catholicism. The popes claim authority over faith and morals. As an expression of faith, the Apostles’ Creed might be valid. But on morals the Church flunks. Catholic natural law is the least convincing of the many versions of natural law, a failure beginning with the attempt by the Church in the early Renaissance to ban taking interest on loans, later to ban smallpox vaccination, on and on to Humanae Vitae (bans contraception) which is obeyed by only 3 percent of Catholics 30 and under, and Evangelium Vitae (Culture of Life) issued by Pope John Paul II.

What we see is that when the Church encounters the modern world, beginning with the Renaissance, the Church finds unconvincing arguments to reject it. The former Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict VI, is seriously concerned about the secularization of Europe, but his response has been to reject modernity with a more stringent orthodoxy, as if hoping for a saving remnant. He would be wiser to explain to people why they should believe in God in the first place.

My own church is a discussion I have with myself and sounds like a seminar. What is the argument for God? For the Resurrection? For an afterlife? These are questions I wouldn’t be asking had it not been for the influence of Rosenstock and his class. Thanks a lot.

Rosenstock-Huessy Returns...

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