Transcript

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[Unidentified speaker]: (In his initial lecture on the chaos of pagan history, Prof. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy argued that the historical present cannot be grasped in terms of the past alone, but -- lives out of the future, which beckons towards us. But at that time, I -- he hadn't told us the difference between faith and hope. And I don't believe I was the only one who went -- away with the feeling that what he's talking about is the way in which history involved our anticipations and aspirations toward the future.

(As we saw in this morning's chapel talk, the dimension of the future which beckons to us can be grasped only in faith, in which we lay ourselves open to the possibilities of being transformed by -- in terms of our own expectations and hopes. Likewise in his second lecture, he spoke to us concerning the c- -- great contrast between progress and the regressus. But it didn't come clear--to me, at least--that the progress we generally think of is really a form of regression, because it is a way of building up our hopes and aspirations, which after all are simply a reflection of what has gone before, which we hope will be bigger and better.

(In his talk this morning, Prof. Rosenstock-Huessy argued the character of faith over -- against hope, faith being that which transforms and shatters our hopes. And so in his talk tonight, I hope we might approach it in the spirit of faith. That is, open to the possibility that what he has to say for us tonight will deepen, enrich, and transform the understanding we have had of what he has been saying in the last three lectures.

(Tonight I give you Prof. Rosenstock-Huessy for his fourth and final Tippett Lecture, "From Halloween to Labor Day.")

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So { } {spiranza}. You see, my introducer has very kindly said that I have warned you against your hopes. It's a hopeless situation.

But I tried in these lectures--which have gone before--to furnish you with the instruments for coping with the step which we all are required to take into an era which will be very different from the last thousand years. I have called the lecture, "Between Halloween and Labor Day," because Halloween was introduced in 864 by the whole Church, at that time still undivided Russian, Eastern, Greek, and Roman. And it was the day for All Saints, as it is still celebrated in remnants by your children every 1st of November.

At the end of this era, in 1889, and the next de- -- decades, there was a big movement on foot to celebrate Labor Day. The Russians celebrate Labor Day on the day first proposed by the Americans in Paris in 1889. Then the Americans were defeated with their plan, and so we celebrate Labor Day on the first Monday after September 1st. But you must know that this is a second choice. The American labor movement is the originator of the -- idea of the May celebration, on May 1st, as it is now celebrated in Moscow, and in all socialist countries. It's important that you do not allow the divisions of this so-called western world--which it is a very small world indeed--to be too im- -- considered too important between you and them. America and Russia are twins. They are not divided by Marxism, because Russia is not a Marxian country anymore. If there is a Marxian country, it's America.

Pardon me for saying this, but I want to warn you against your slogans, and I want to emphasize that we live in one continuum of the last thousand years, which is defined by the day of All Saints--at which the march of the saints, into the world as the Church, came to an end because the day of All Saints ends the necessity of celebrating every saint on a special day--and Labor Day, in which our vile bodies, our sweat, our toil are celebrated. On Labor Day, we are not celebrated because we are saints, but because we are animals. We are donkeys. We suffer under the load of work, which we have to perform. We sweat.

There is a great tension in these, between All Saints--Halloween--and Labor Day. If we got -- would get stuck in these thousand years--or -- nearly -- ja, a thousand years would be right, I think; 864 to 1889--we would not live up to the demands of our own time. And most people decline to live in their own time. Most people live in their grandparents' time.

So my attempt tonight must be to show you that the Cross is a very practical thing to escape from the last thousand years, not because they were not good thousand years, but because they have come to an end. Why have they come -- to come -- have come to an end? Why is it not enough to ce- -- go on celebrating--as the Catholics do, or the Greek Orthodox--All Saints on the onehand side, and then plunge for Labor Day?

There is a day in between, called All Souls, which was introduced in 996 of our era by a very wise man who said, "We must comfort the people. They have pagan ancestors. They think their ancestors may be in Hell. So we will celebrate a day for All Souls, and not a day for All Saints, only." So on the 2nd of November, there is a day by which the old nations of the western world -- all the Christian nations who had accepted Christianity, got the comfort that their ancestors--Christian or no Christian, you see--were also well taken care of, that the world had been created by God before the Lord came, and redeemed the world;

and that therefore on All Souls, there was universal peace.

So if you would add a word to my theme, "Between Halloween and Labor Day," you may add "The Time of All Souls." Because for a thousand years this interested the nations of Europe--and of America, by the way--the day of All Souls.

Today I think that the days are very blurred. I wo- -- do not wish to examine you, what you know still. But I think it's very mediocre. People today are very doubtful whether men have souls. The psychologists say, "No." William James used to say that he could be a good psychologist without the notion of a soul. I admire the man, but I pity him. I can't. I'm very old-fashioned. And I think that if we want to celebrate the third millennium--with its Labor Day, with its unity of all toiling, sweating, and -- in- -- unfinished humanity--we will not be able to forget that our soul has certain ambitions and demands beyond our labor.

I'm going to -- at this by stating dogmatically first--you see, I love dogma, and I always admire the people who think this is a -- is a vituperation, this is a criticism, if you say, "He's" -- "I'm dogmatic." I don't see how any reasonable man can be anything but dogmatic, because "dogmatic" means that I think it is true. And I can only honor you by telling the things I hold to be very true, dogmatically true. And all other things -- all other statements I suppress, because I think it was -- would be an impertinence if I would talk to you undogmatically.

This I have to say, because the fashion today is to -- to boast that you are undogmatic. I don't understand what that means.

The soul of man--I tried to tell you this, this morning--stretches out between the past and the future in the present. In every one of us, there is this gallow beam represented by which we are fixed to the day of our birth, to the environment of our government, and to the aspirations of our future. And that is a crucial situation. And therefore all souls are nailed to a cross.

Winston Churchill's -- has in his memoirs a very nice sentence, where he said, "Every man is nailed either to a cross of action or to a cross of thought."

What I have in mind tonight, however, is the admission that it is impossible for the individual to -- car- -- bear his cross alone. Mankind it- -- himself--themselves, I should say--is the bearer of the cross, the Christophorus. Our Lord bear- -- bore the Cross. It is not -- not possible that every one of us just bears his cross in privacy. What we call "the Church" will be in the future the union of the people who get together to bear the cross of this century, or of this age, or of the human race. By which I mean quite concretely something which I

hope now to be able to explain.

You see, history in our textbooks is American history, history of California, history of Stockton, history of the University of Pac- -- of the Pacific, your own life story. Perhaps the story of your family. This to me is not history. That -- are stories, because they have no end, and no aim. They begin somewhere, and they end somewhere. And therefore they have no arrondissement. They have no rotundity. They have no style. They are little spots on the easel of the painter. History is only there where we -- the Creed in one God unites all these many facts. Here are over a hundred people. If we should have a common history, it is not by your or my intent. But it is given above us, you see. And we may believe this. And we may help it -- to do it. But neither you nor I know this story or make this story intentionally. And we believe it. We have faith in it. And I think there is such a history. Perhaps there is even a history of this college. And the history of -- of this college may be determined by this evening. But it is not your or my doing, but it's only our faithful service in this moment by which we may take part in this process.

So let me lay down most dogmatically that history presupposes the brotherhood of all men; and the Creed in one God, maker of Heaven and earth; and the Maker of all future and past history. That's quite important, I think.

And therefore, all history presupposes something rather queer. That all the history, that to us is past, at one time was future history by other people -- by our brothers. There is no history unless you admit that this, what you call now "past," was at one time future for people who had the same human heart, the same humanity in themselves as you pretend to have today. Therefore history is lived in this brotherhood of man by a -- partially by people to whom the history is still ahead of time, and by others who harvest it and look backward.

This is very comforting, I think. Any family lives by this hope, that the -- the parents give life to the children, and the children know that they were expected and wanted. And later they look back to their parents and admit that they knew better. The children today, you see, prevent themselves from having children too often.

History has a totally different aspect as soon as you be kind enough to admit that we only can call history something that at one time was future for real human beings--trembling, expecting, hopeful human beings. Our history books deny this. They are pagan history books, because they omit the expectations of the people before it was done. Too often, not all. There are good history books I would divide the history books according to this amount of respect that the historian pays to the people who did it, who dreaded it, who expected it.

So I think we have taken one step forward. And this is why my previous lectures were out to prepare this, that history is a unity from beginning to end. It is -- begins only there where it is expected, dreaded, hoped for, started; it ends only where this unity is accepted, and sanctified, and ratified by the heirs, by the grandchildren. All other history is good for the zoo. You can of course write the history of the lion. And you can also write the history of the elephant. You can write the history of the Stone Age Indians. And all this is not history. It doesn't deserve this honorable title of "history," because the human heart is involved in real history. And it's one heart which has -- we ha- -- has been -- has been put in every one of us, one and the same heart. As to the heart, we are equal. Otherwise we are not, as you know.

We have a -- strange democracy in which the assumption is that everything is equal. We overlook the skin, we overlook the religion, we -- "regardless of race -- color, creed," et cetera, you see. But the only thing we have in common is -- is the human heart. And if we would admit this, we would be related to the people thousands of years ago, and thousands of years in -- in the future. It's the only unity we have, the heart, you see, because we may assume that the -- the heart of tomorrow and the heart of yesterday { } is of the same caliber.

If the people who looked forward and the people who look backward form a unity, it is well to ask which shape this unity could have. We formerly, very courageously, down to the Reformation, spoke of the Church, the visible Church as containing future and past saints. Faithful, fideles, as the Latin word was.

All this is today -- has been interrupted in the last 200 years. And I don't think that we may be able to unite mankind in the -- in a visible Church. It doesn't look like it. That's why I've made an attempt in these lectures to show you that man is in a crucial situation, that the Cross of Jesus is not a sentimental something--taught now for the last 200 years, because people didn't want to shed tears over Him--but that the cross of mankind is a real situation for every one of us, and for the whole of mankind. If you under- -- allow me to investigate the beams of the Cross, the crucial situation in which we all are suspended, then perhaps you will understand why perhaps after an eclipse of 200 or 300 years, the Cross of Christ is a way of explaining what we have to expect, what we have to do, and how we can live.

The Cross, as you see, is denied by the historians. They only have straight lines, or spirals, or cycles, or curves. And I have spent much time to prepare you to reject these notions of Mr. Spengler, or Mr. Toynbee, or Mr. Moynbee. All these wonderful circle -- vicious circles. Twenty-three civilizations, and 72. This is utter nonsense. And I'm ashamed of the academic world who takes this nonsense

seriously. It is just nonsense. Nobody has ever seen a spiral working in human society. Yet they say that history moves in cy- -- in spirals. I have still to find a man who -- who can find one word of sense in this idea. And yet the books are -- go through many editions, and our schoolchildren learn such nonsense.

Certainly history is not a straight line. I mean, in 1864, the South was vanquished, and it says it hasn't lost the Civil War today. So what happened in these hundred years is a very interesting question. Something was stopped. It did not run off, run on. No evolution took place, you see. It was blocked. That's a very interesting phenomenon. How can we explain this? Time is of -- goes -- time runs, isn't it? -- at great speed. Better and bigger cars, better and bigger airport -- -planes. But the South is the same as in 1864.

So human beings obviously do not enter the physics -- realm of stopwatches. You cannot count human history by years, by decades, by seconds, or minutes. That's all wrong. That's a convey- -- that's very good for -- for the steam, and -- and coal, and all metals, and all things of this earth. For the human heart, it isn't true. If you know the wickedness of the human heart, or the stubbornness of a human heart, and the obstinacy, you see -- there are girls who -- consider themselves engaged for 20 years. The man comes never back, but they still think you -- they are engaged to marry.

How can you prove it, that they are not engaged to marry? They will not believe you if you tell them that they should look for another husband.

Our clockwork has nothing to do with physics. You can find people on this earth who still believe as in the days of the Exodus. The -- all orthodox Israels do this.

I had a friend in Israel, a young woman, who always said to me -- if I teased her, she said, "We have been present at the Sinai, we ourselves." Quite courageous. But you can't defy it, and you can't deny it. There is a great power in this. "We have been present at the Sinai ourselves." The -- medieval Christian would have been told you the same. He would have said, "We are present at Easter on Golgotha." And there is some truth in it. You can't deny that this word can be said with good sense.

But this means that the astronomical chronology of so-called history is -- has very little to do with the history of the human heart, and our history. And this country in America cannot cure -- heal his wounds, as long as you believe that automatically, because the Civil War is now 102 years old, it must be over. Obviously it isn't. How do you explain this? Time is not of the essence, if you treat it as physicists' time, as natural time, as cosmic time. It's something very

different.

For many, many years I have been puzzled and suffered under this. It began in the First World War, that I recognized -- I had been an historian by profession. And when you are in the war, it doesn't help you -- you are a professional historian, because you are in history itself. And you learn a little more than in history courses. Even in advanced history cur- -- courses.

What does one learn in a war? That the dead, who are sacrificed, the heroes of the battlefield, go with us, and must not be forgotten. That although seemingly they have died--you remember the -- my story of Judah, and the four directors of the railroad. Mr. Judah is alive, and these four millionaires are dead. At least that's what should be. If it isn't, we are wrong. Then we have made a mistake. Probably we may have made the mistake. But I assure you that Mr. Judah built this Central -- Railroad Pacific, and not the four people who built the mansions on Nob Hill.

So where is the man? Where is he? All the people who died for a cause, these victims, which the Veterans of -- of Foreign Wars, for example, will celebrate in their -- in their celebration with some sympathetic memory -- all the dead are in this sense as present as you and I here. If you really understand history, you know that the shape of their courage, the shape of their actions cannot be missed the -- as the mortar which keeps up the building in which we here celebrate, and sit. They are the mortar at this moment, thanks to whom we exist. And because this is so, it is not true simply to say, "They are dead." If you say this, you are one of the modern barbarians who say there are 10 hundred different civilizations. I'm satisfied with my own civilization for whose upkeep I'm responsible. And my responsibility is to keep the memory of these dead very much alive, and to say by -- at every opportunity to the unknow- -- ignorant children that they are the makers of our good fortune, and not you and I.

This is the whole story of Christianity: an attempt to make the man at Easter, who disappeared in a perfectly shameful and abominable situation, to make Him more important than the disciples. Those of you who were -- who was present at the first lecture? Well, it is a majority, so you will allow me, the others, to point out that I spoke there of these four first directors of the Central Railroad, and the man who had suggested it to them, insinuated with them, put down the tra- -- trac- -- first track, and threw the thir- -- first shovel of earth down for the rail. This man in our secular society is dismissed. Too bad. The four directors are hoisted up as big men. Christianity has made a very successful -- effort to turn around and say, "The real story is that Jesus enabled the four evangelists to write the four evan- -- Gospels. And although they lived and He died, it is more important to remember Him than the four evangelists." So we know that -- Him, from Matthew, and from John, and from Mark, and from Luke, we know very

little, and we are not even very interested in the four Gospel writers. They just did what is expected from all of us. We -- they kept alive the memory of the sacrifice by which our world has been made possible.

If this should be so, then we are quite superior to the natural course of events. The fact that Mr. Stan- -- Leland Stanford only died in 1900, and the fact that Mr. Theodore Judah, the engineer of the Central Railroad, died in 1863 is not important. Mr. Theodore Judah is important, because he died so early from the cause on -- of yellow fever, and Mr. Leland Stanford is not important.

Anybody who can read history in this way saves it from oblivion not only, but he saves it from decay. The more you and I are willing to celebrate the sacrifices, the more the successful gentlemen can be tolerated.

In 1919, President Eliot of the -- Harvard University was 90 years of age. He was retired. He was still the great citizen of the Bostonian area. And Boston, you know, is as famous a town as San Francisco. And the Chamber of Commerce and the unions in Boston decided that they would celebrate the contributions of capital and labor to the winning of the First World War. It was 1919. So they got their men together; and in the largest hall of Boston, they investigated this great question: who had done more, capital or labor, for winning World War I?

At the end of the evening, 10 o'clock, the chairman said, "Gentlemen, we have here the honor of having Preside- -- the president of Harvard University, President Eliot. He has taken the trouble, despite his old age, to come here. And so I think we should ask him what he has to say about the contributions of labor and capital for the winning of World War I."

And Mr. Eliot did something very simple. He erected himself. The old man, he had a massive scar from a -- a burn in his face--grew by this effort, and said, "I don't care for the contributions made by capital. I don't care for the contribution made by labor. But I do care for the losses incurred by the brides and mothers of the people who were killed in this war." And sat down. And nobody had anything more to say.

So it's an old story. I have not invented this idea, you see, that you and I, we are responsible for keeping the victims alive, and not the people who -- the benefit- -- the profiteers. That's quite serious, because all our history at this moment is strangled, because this is not done. What you call "success" is not success in the kingdom of Heaven.

If you -- however undertake this, you suddenly are stymied by the gigantic magnitude of this task, because it means that the lines of history are not just

going forward from 1864 to 1967, for example; but that the line of your heart must stretch backward to 1864 to find these victims, and give life to them. And this perhaps enables you to understand that the only form of this unnatural character, which lifts history over -- above physics, and above nat- -- the natural sciences so high, is the crucial form. Only in the Cross has man found a -- a form in which the directions -- changes, in which one thing is true, although the opposite is true, too.

I've written a whole book on this question, that we are forced to respond to tasks in life--you and I--every day, although we have prejudices against them, although we didn't expect it. Wherever you find the -- syllable, "although" --. It would have been much simpler for Mr. Eliot not to speak at 90, you know, at this meeting and make new enemies--he had enough before. But he couldn't. He couldn't remain silent. And he had to say, "Although you celebrate labor and capital, be ashamed of yourself." This "although" is always a crucial act, which people just hate. And if you read the psychology of the modern heroes of -- of success, they will never allow you any measure that contains the syllable, "although."

Thirty years ago, I wrote a whole book on this topic, and said, "For the last hundreds of years, you have learned this sentence, 'I think, therefore I am,' 'Cogito, ergo sum,' you see. I advise you, if you want to live in society a good life, you must turn around and say something quite different: 'I respond, although this will bring about a change of me. I will change, but I have to respond to the stimulus that forces me to acknowledge something I hadn't expected. For example, that somebody else has the merit, and not myself.'"

The syllable -- the two syllables, "although," are supernatural. And although this country is -- are excelling at this moment in trying to prove that Jesus was natural, that everything is natural, the president of the United States is natural -- since you live in this pipe dream, that we are all just horses and animals, and things, and we can be measured, and we can be catalogued, and we can be treated statistically, please understand that any human being is statistically unimportant. That as long as you are found in the statistic, you are not known. You are not. Anything that the statistics contain is not of any historical value or importance. It's good for the statistician. It's good for the plumbers. It's good for the railroads. They must know this. But it is only your shell which they count. Man begins where he says, "Just the same, I won't do it. Although the temptation is great to lose myself in statistics, I shall know that the real person will never be called a statistic."

This syllable -- these two syllables, "although," is funny. They are the reduction of the Christian tradition at this moment in our human language. That

is still vital. It is still possible, I think, to con- -- to ask a daughter not to run away from home, although she wants to, because her parents are invalids. She may stay. And -- such other sacrifices are made every day. Wherever you find them, they are founded in the human heart's strange power to erect a crucial situation. They cross out the tendency, the trend, the statistically probable, the recommendable, the reasonable, the -- sober. And you do -- although reason tells you, you shouldn't, you do it. That's worth doing. Nothing in life is live -- is alive, or is human, that is not able to defy some natural causes, some natural reasons. Because by gravity, you see, all dead things live. And if you follow by gravity the -- the next best incentive, you see, you are just a thing -- a thing or a stone. You throw a stone into the water, it falls; and it even makes very nice circles. You can do the same. You can jump into the water of temptation, and into the water of fashion, and the water of success; but you are nothing but a stone, a lodestone, and a very superfluous being. And people have a strange tendency today to make themselves superfluous.

Man is necessary, indispensable, was created on this globe obviously for one purpose: that he could change trends, that he could resist gravity, that he could go uphill. Man is the uphill animal of creation. All water runs down the hill. Do you? You climb the mountain. This is unnatural. But fortunately we are meant to be unnatural. We are meant to cla- -- climb mountains, and not to roll them down { }.

Everybody of course lives quite right. I mean, the people are much better than their philosophies. But what you have in your brain, that amounts to shavings. What is taught in our official schools today is an attempt to transform us back into donkeys, not to say monkeys. It is an attempt to tame us, to tell us that there is no "although." But this is not a good -- nothing is reasoned out when you say, "Because I will make $10,000," "Because I can retire at 50." I have heard students in my college say this terrible phrase, "Because I can retire with this firm at 50, I must take their offer." No. Such a man should be burned at stake. He's not a human being. He can be an omelet, but not a human being. Because he can retire at 50, "I must accept at 20 the job."

I asked him, "And what will the work be like?"

"Oh," he said. "Terrible."

So he was willing to -- waste his life, you see, these 30 years for this wonderful idea that he could live at 50 in Florida, and die -- go on dying. This is how modern youth today allows itself to be treated.

The human heart is always in this crucial situation. And if you have here

the line that goes forward on the highway of life in a straight line--Route 19--you have to listen in to your heart, at which point you have to deviate. You have to cross this out and say, "Although this big, high road leads in this direction, although I must look around the corner and see what's there," whatever that is. If -- unless you have this power to resist all the highways of the world, wide as they are, convenient as they are, stocked as they are, made you -- making you as welcome as they do, as long as you don't have this, you are not borne by the spirit. You are not a second-born human being. And this old rule that man has to be born twice is unfortunately simply true, although the churches have forgotten it.

So let me speak outside the Church that this is still true. Man has to be born a second time. And he is it, at the very moment, when all the luxuries and all the temptations from the outside world cannot prevail against this one syllable, "although." Unfortunately here is no blackboard. Otherwise I would like to develop before your eyes the power of the cross. It's the only form or shape which is not found in nature. A cross, you see, is only possible to humans, because we can leave off one trend and start at another end. And that's tremendous, you see. All other things have to follow by gravity, by instinct, by custom, by habit in the direction in which they are -- have started. You and I, however, can break off and say, "I take another tack." And all life which you have here in this building--your dress, your clothes, the fact that you sit here, that you can understand me--is based on events in which people took another tack. We are the sum of the other tacks. And we are the fruit of crucial living, of this cross of which our Lord was the first who proclaimed it as the inevitable. Of course, He only proclaimed--became vocal--for all the victims that have gone on before. You must not think that Christianity began with Christ. But the hope, the expectation, the willingness to sacrifice was in all the pagan tribes, also. Only they had no -- way of telling why they did it. But sacrifices, of course, of the first order have been brought in all -- all over the globe. Otherwise there would be no mankind alive today.

So it is very hard to stay within the Christian achievement which made -- revealed the Cross, which revealed this power of the "although," you see, and not -- and -- not to forget that of course life on this earth would have never come even to the point in -- in Jerusalem, and in -- on -- Golgotha unless people, mothers, babies, men, soldiers had this power of going against their interest.

When I came to this country--this was before the Second World War, it could happen in a classroom, in the college at which I -- in which I taught; that was Harvard University--that the death of a soldier in -- in the battlefield was labeled "enlightened self-interest." The people were so ashamed of sacrifice, they were so ashamed of the power to act against your own interest, you see, that

they called the -- death of the hero, "enlightened self-interest." I think that may be {going on} still; you look at me as though I was mad. I think the people were mad who said -- called this "enlightened self-interest." To die as a soldier on the battlefield is the opposite of enlightened self-interest. But it's a light which says, "Self-interest is not enough." It cancels out the self-interest. Otherwise there is no death on the battlefield. But this country had managed to -- to--how would I say?--to pack into the self even those acts which overcame the self. Don't do it.

You betray yourself of the most important category of reality, that man can go against his own interest. And he may be enlightened, or may -- he may follow his self-interest. But it isn't one and the same thing. And any -- all attempts to reduce the action of mankind to this ki- -- little of -- game of psychology, which tries to hypnotize the rat, so that it surrenders, isn't worth the {candle}. It may be good for the -- for -- for professors, but it isn't good for their victims. A -- a soldier -- on the battlefield does not act from enlightened selfinterest, because he has dumped his self. He has overcome his great fears. He is afraid, trembling. But if he obeys orders and is killed, that's not from enlightened self-interest, but from his decision that his self-interest does not count. That's the opposite.

But the -- in the last 50 years in this country, this whole jargon of no soul, and "enlightened self-interest," you see -- enabled--I don't know whom enabled--I think it enabled the people on Madison Avenue to write such wonderful -- wonderful advertising; so we have to read all the nonsense that they publish in their journals, you see, all for enlightened self-interest. And it was all put in -- into one big casserole. And anything you enjoy, anything you name -- and you -- imbibe, anything you read, anything you said came under this one, single category of enlightened self-interest. If you have only one line, you see, and everything must be in the same line, then this is the result. But if you admit that you and I live in a crucial situation, that at any minute down from Heaven the thunderbolt can stop your nonsense and tell you that you are here for better things--not for your enlightened self or your unenlightened self--that's very different. If you keep this open to you, that there is a communication which is not derived from your years in grammar school, your years in high school, and your years in college, and your years in this -- in graduate school, and your sears -- years in the Chamber of Commerce, and your years with reading the Saturday Evening Post, this is not the logic of your biography. The logic of any man's biography is that he has an ear and a heart into which suddenly sounds fall, which he has never heard before, which has never had any authority over him, which have been defied by his teachers and his parents as nonsense; and he suddenly discovers that they make very much sense, and that if he doesn't heed them, the world will perish.

Great truth is always connected with your and my insight that without my taking sides, something -- a catastrophe must happen. You can only volunteer in a war when you know that without you, the war will be lost. You can only save a child in -- from the water, from a -- from a -- a rapid stream as long as you know -- believe that without you, the child would -- would drown. You may drown in the process. That doesn't alter the fact that you have to jump in and try to -- to save the child. It is so simple. Everybody, by the way -- does these things. But we have developed a theory of monism in which a man's mind is closed to all outside surprising voices, to all crucial issues, and which he is this logical line of development--you call it "evolution," is equally silly term. I've never seen anybody evolve. A decent person jumps, dances, writes, jubilees, curses; but he certainly doesn't develop. That's all taken from -- from geese, from animals. I'm not an animal. I decline to follow Mr. Darwin. I'm underdeveloped. And that's my honor. They cannot develop me. I hope they cannot develop you. What you are going to be, that is your business, Sir, and no one -- no developers'. That's good for real estate. Develop. Onions. I'm not an onion.

However, it is -- it takes some strength in this modern world, and in this modern world of -- of magazines, Colliers, and Dollier's, and Wollier's to keep one's mind. And therefore, believe me; we are not alone in this fight. The Cross, this power to say, "Although I won't," waits to be joined by all of us. My dream is that in the third millennium, when the Great Society of Mr. Johnson makes headway, we recognize that we are not just joined on a globe by airlines--United, and -- and Disunited, and Qantas--but that we are united in our hearts, which has nothing to do with geography; it has nothing to do with race and color; it has nothing to do with political power; it has not even to do with money, which is saying quite a bit.

The cross to which we are united, and whose head is -- the first Easter hero, enables everyone to draw on this tremendous treasure of conviction that no act of a human heart ever is lost. That's called faith.

In the last -- in the last 200 years, we have tried--as I said at the beginning--to escape from the old, more or less Catholic or Orthodox iconography. You find today Christianity rarely expressed just in pa- -- paintings of saints, or in paintings of ritual. But allow me to suggest that there are certain symbols which we may pick up without being scolded as superstitious. I -- let me begin -- there the Cross comes in. The Cross has been treated through the Crucifix, as you know, very much as an ecclesiastical item, and a gem. Then the Protestants abolished the -- the CrucifixSavior, and left the Cross. I don't know if here is one. No, there's an eagle. Return to nature. And -- yes, that's what it is.

Now as a simile, as a -- as a story, allow me to tell the story of the four

evangelists, in the -- last 1800 years of iconography, that is, of picture writing. The four evangelists who wrote the story of the Lord were, of course, not writers -- professional writers. They never had written a book in their life, before. And they were not professors. And they didn't expect that their book writing would be mentioned as a reason for promotion. This shall happen today, I'm told. But it shouldn't. You should only write books when you must, and for no other reason. Well, I'm now serious for a moment. That is, these four evangelists were given already in the days of St. Augustine, in the year 400, by four symbols. They were taken from the Old Testament. And the four symbols was: the eagle for John; and the lion for Mark, and an angel for Matthew, and an ox for Luke.

When I was young, I admired these symbols, but I was dissatisfied. I said they were not eloquent. And lo and behold, in the -- around 1800, they were given up.

A young friend of mine who built a church in 1900, in the south of Germany, omitted the symbols of the four evangelists. The -- the -- the priest was quite taken aback, but he said, "That's obsolete. What -- why should John be given an eagle? Eagles are no longer of any lang- -- linguistic power." And I had to admit this. But I was sorry, because there was some nakedness in this.

And so around 1914, I discovered that some painters and sculptors gave heed to this problem, and I myself dabbled with this. And I felt that if we could understand the four evangelists as representing four definite mental attitudes -- spiritual attitudes of man, that we could very well regain some power to design them. And so I felt that Luke was the -- the first sitting teacher of the Church; and Matthew was the fighter who went -- left Judah, and went to -- into Ethiopia--you know, he converted the Ethiopians, and so he is always given as standing. So I said: one standing, one sitting; that makes sense. And of Mark it is said that he was -- of John it is said that he was lying on the island of Patmos, receiving the Apocalypse, the Revelation into his heart, like one dead. So he was given horizontal. And Number 4, Mark, was kneeling at the lectern in Rome when Peter preached, and got his -- as a deacon got from -- from his bishop the news.

So you have sitting man, kneeling man, lying man, and standing man. And this in -- is in a way, the complete register of -- man's spiritual life. We do, according to your -- your experiences, kneel; lie prostrate; sit--teaching, for example, you see, or learning; and fighting as a lawyer in court, you see, standing upright and defending his cause. Now I was very much taken by this idea that perhaps man is not just an individual, but is the receptacle of spiritual processes, and that in these four ways, he is expressing something eternally true, that unless you and I can lie prostrate in despair, or in -- in intuition; can stand in fighting, in disputing, in denying some -- some injustice; if you cannot kneel in

reverence for some higher authority; and if you cannot sit in imparting your acquired knowledge to the younger set, for example, or to the listeners, you aren't a complete human being.

So I feel there is hope that our four Gospels regain one time the colorful character they had in the old Church, you see, that -- people felt that oh, these are not just people, but these are people coined, and stamped out into a certain spiritual attitude, an attitude which we receive by reading their Gospel. They make us kneel; they make us sit; they make us adore; they make us -- debate.

Of course, I cannot follow this through. But I'm convinced that the Protestant world will either go atheistic, as it well -- may be, or it will overcome its antiCatholic bias against forms and shapes, and will conquer man's physical expression of his spiritual life. God made us into receptacles of the Spirit, and He did not make us just into bigger and better elephants.

And therefore my plea has to mention these things, so that you may believe that man has in himself reserves of spiritual protest, of spiritual "although." Any of these four attitudes mean that the man is superior to the stimuli of the advertising agency on Madison Avenue, that he is superior to images, to these idols which these people dare to offer you, decent people, and say -- "The president must have an image." And nobody kills these people. Nobody burns their houses at stake. That's just a return to the worst idolatry that ever visited Egypt. Nobody protests this. These people make money on this idea that they can sell images. This is forbidden.

Therefore, what I say--you may -- sound very exalted to you, and very strange, but believe me, it's like a fire extinguisher. The house is burning, your house, the house of America. It has allowed the money makers to intrude the sanctuary. This is quite serious. You have to be told that you must not listen to these tempters. You must not. You must -- this boy who said to me, "Because I can retire at 50, I must accept this -- this -- this position," you see, he must be shamed to death. You must drive this out of him, or out of yourself.

If we did this, we would discover that around this kneeling, this lying, this standing, and this sitting spirit of man: the teacher, and the prophet, and the -- and the fighter, there is -- then this cross, which in this strange way as I tried to show it to you this morning, allows you to in every minute to be your father's child, to be your children's ancestor, and to be your neighbor's friend. That is a crucial situation. We are as much crucified as the Lord was. In His -- the garden of Gethsemane, it wasn't his free choice. He knew that he was from Israel; He was an Israelite, of the Israelites, but He was the founder of the Church, of His children in the Spirit, too. And He was alone with a few people--Mary Magda-

lene, His mother, and St. John--who at this moment even identified Him with the highest that mankind had. I think the figure of the Cross means that you and I can identify ourselves not in a house of God, not in this hall, but in this fact that we belong to the ages.

What was said of Lincoln, "Now he belongs to the ages," has been quoted time and again. But wouldn't it be nice if it could be said of -- by -- of -- all of us? Don't we belong to the ages? Do we only belong to the ages because somebody murders us? Perhaps we just cease to murder ourselves. That's all that can mean. And in this moment, man would outgrow his lifetime. He would outgrow his classroom. He would outgrow his geographical belonging. There would be no California and no Connecticut. The soul of man is straight, given from Heaven. Anybody who can say to the tempter, "although," belongs to this crucial, gigantic cross that waits to be established all over this globe.

Thank you.