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Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Live! »

Universal History (1956)

Lecture 6 (1:44:58)

We are in the midst of a tremendous, real universal history. Who cares for the French history, or for English history? A secular story. They are of no importance, if you compare them to this tremendous 2,000 years of organized life in the form of the Holy Spirit, of this power to connect more than one generation of man in the same spirit, to bear fruit, where one generation sows, and the other harvests. This has not existed before, and it is threatened today.

—May 8,1956

Transcript

{ } = word or expression can't be understood
{word} = hard to understand, might be this

[Opening remarks missing]

... that's really ...

[Tape interruption]

... to the living. At Halloween, they do. And these children can represent the dead and -- over all the -- the older people by knocking at the door and making a nuisance of themselves if they are not treated well. Now gentlemen, here the dead speak to the living and the children come as the dead, and they have this great power over the adults. Not one of you has even asked what this does to the relations of the young to the adults. Not one! And that there is really the old situation of the dead speaking to the living.

Well, why do I tell you this? Obviously you have the -- such suspicion that everything I tell you here is absolute nonsense, and everything that is pop- -- printed in a popular book in the reference room is true. The abyss between your over-estimation of this nonsense which is in these reference books, and that which I have learned in a long life by my own research and study is -- is just fantastic. You despise everything I teach you here. Why do you take this course, if you don't believe me? And you believe every nonsense which is printed in a popular, marketable, cheap, folklore magazine in this country, full of nonsense and -- and stupidity with druids, and Celts, and all this nonsense about Halloween. Not a word of truth in it. This you copy. All right, copy it, but then you should compare it with what you have heard here and say, "It doesn't seem to be true. It seems to be more serious" from what we have here in this course. You don't even have to fall for what I say if you have a -- this lack of respect for my own authority. But gentlemen, why don't you even hear? Why are you in this course, then? And that's -- it's right through with all your treatment of all the other holidays. You keep this absolutely apart. How you do this, where your -- these wards, these compartments within you are, I do not know. But it seems to me a case of absolute immaturity, like a child of 7. You -- this is not a way you learn anything. I'm absolutely appalled. It has done you no good, writing these papers, certainly. It's all -- it's -- and by the way, it is an incredible insult to -- all my work I have put into this course. That's my life work. I have worked on this course now for 50 years. And not a word I have said here is believed. You just say -- it's just my speculation, or my private idea. Do you {really} believe this? It's true.

But not -- here is the Halloween, here is All Souls, here is All Saints, or here is

Easter, and Christmas. I give you the paper, 360 And 5, not a word of truth in all this. Not a word of work, which I have done in this. Some -- some handbook, some textbook, which the reference department hands out to you, that's all you know. Gentlemen, I come -- I -- I'm now the ghost at Halloween myself, in my own estimation. I'm just a ghost. I certainly am not alive to you. But I'm just dead. If I only could understand it. You will refute me, but you must at least admit that I have said something. But nothing is important in you anymore. Nothing. Even not our Creed.

Now let me therefore -- I -- I have now spent my time which I should have { } -- be given to the reading of these reports, to these remarks. And so I have to go on.

We have three -- four more lectures, gentlemen. I have to try to -- you -- to introduce you to the place in which -- at which we halt at this moment. After creation has been put in motion again, and after we are in the melting pot, in the crucible of a perpetual re-creation, since the days of Christ, mankind has joined its creator in admitting that every day is creation. Creation is now. Eternity is now. At this moment, the Creator is still creating. That's the difference between the Christian era and all the past, that there they try to have certainties. Of course, most people today live in the pre-Christian era. The last word of last time was that I tried to show you that every one of you can relapse into the pre-Christian era. Most of you do. One studies the Greeks. The other studies the Bible, the other studies the -- the -- studies sports, and goes back to the red Indians. The other is out for power and the state department, and the great issues. And so all of you are either Egyptians or Romans, or you are red Indians and Germanic tribes, or you are Greek scholars and humanists, or you are Jewish prophets and pious high-church Anglo- -- Anglo-Catholics. That's all pre-Christian. It has absolutely nothing to do with Christianity. The Christian era says that all these things are in order, as long as they are subordinated to the fact that creation is now.

And therefore the Creed says this very strange sentence, gentlemen, that the living Creator judges the dead and the living. In Egypt, the dead are judged by the living. Horus is the judge, and his father Osiris, whom he delegates to the sky, is the judge of the dead. And the great invention of the -- of the Egyptian empire is the judgment of the dead. The Book of the Dead you have heard of -- this famous document which still is used in Tibet to this day, because people still think that the living have to put the -- dead in their place. The living have to say, "We follow the -- the order of the universe. But the dead may have sinned against it, so we have to put them in their place." And in any tribe, gentlemen, to this day, if you go to the Navajo Indians, why do they dance these dances? To expiate, to reconcile with the ancestors. And therefore the dead judge the living,

the quick. You have of course repeated -- and many mini- -- most ministers today repeat this sentence of our Creed in the third article, "... who is coming to judge the living and the -- the quick and the dead," as a just empty phrase, and you think that's long superseded.

Gentlemen, if you want to live in the mo- -- today, fruitfully, this is the condition of your living at all: that you are neither under the domination of the dead, nor under the domination of the living. If you are under the domination of the quick, you have to adore Mr. Eisenhower, as the last word, in normalcy. And if you wish to bow to tradition, you just have to wear an alumni cap and contribute to the Alumni Fund of Dartmouth College. That's -- one is sentimental, and the other is clever. But it -- both deprives you of your humanity, because as a human being, you have the great privilege of being the spearhead, the growing point of creation. At this moment, you are creating. And neither the quick nor the dead, gentlemen, are your authorities. Neither the quick nor the dead. Neither the laws of this country. They may by that time have become corrupt. That's just an -- as long as -- as -- as you haven't experienced a deeper experience, you may say, "The judge -- laws are good enough for me," you see. But you never know how long it will last. They may become unjust.

So gentlemen, this -- what I am trying to say today to you is something difficult. I have been asked by one of you the question: whether now, not after the coming of Christ, everything we had to do was the imitation of Christ. And I should talk about this, he asked me. Or he asked about this: wasn't this all the formula we should use? I say emphatically "No." Because the word "imitation" certainly is a wrong term. Imitation has -- as you -- I may not -- explain, the great danger of imitation. And obviously to imitate anything is not living.

So, gentlemen, the very word "imitation of Christ" is very dangerous word. And that's why Christianity, in order to make all adulation of Christ impossible, of Jesus of Nazareth impossible, it has introduced the idea of the spirit, of the Holy Spirit. Now for 2,000 years, gentlemen, Christianity has tried to live with all the emphasis on the second and first article of our Creed. You hardly know what the Creed is. The Creed consists of three parts. In the second article, you say that you believe in Christ as a redeemer. And in the first, you say that you -- believe in the Father as the maker. But there is a third article, of which I have just quoted one sentence, that He is coming to judge the quick and -- no, that's the second article, {by the way}. { } Isn't it? Ja. Second article. Quick and the dead. But in the third ar- -- we shall find a number of mysteries which are forgotten, and which have led to the most empty and presumptuous imitation of -- of the first Christian. And certainly the imitation of the first Christian is no good, is not -- has nothing to do with Christianity. If God creates today as He created 1900 years ago, He obviously is original. And you cannot expect Him to be obeyed by

imitating anybody else. You are in the making. Nobody else is.

So I'm going to read to you a very strange statement of the year 1861, made by an American gentleman whom you all know. His name is Ralph Waldo Emerson. And when he wrote this, he thought that he was not writing as a Christian. And that's probably why it was so very Christian. It's a very strange sentence, because it is so -- paragraph, because it is so very great. It has never been quoted. It's just found in an appendix to his biography. It has never been reprinted otherwise. It just looks like a private note in an article of his, and yet I have found no better statement of the Holy Spirit. It is something that nobody at this moment in this country seems to believe, except myself. But of course, I am a better American than you are, because I had to become one, and you have been born as one. It's a very strange thing, and I wish -- I may dictate it to you, because I don't think you will find it anywhere else. If I may dictate it. It's in the middle of somewhere. And he says:

"This want of veracity does not remain in speech ..."

The Holy Spirit of course has to do something with the truth, and with the non-imitation. If you are veracious, you can't imitate anybody else.

"... This want of veracity does not remain in speech. It proceeds instantly to manners and behaviors -- it proceeds instantly to manners and behavior ..." Stop.

"... How any want of frankness on one part destroys all sweetness of discourse ..."

Now comes the strange sentence which is utterly un-American.

"... You may attract by your talents and character -- you may attract by your talents and character in the need others have of you ..."

And now comes the sentence which will show you why you can't imitate.

"... But the attempt to attract directly is the beginning of falsehood."

That's said against Madison Avenue.

"But the attempt to attract directly is the beginning of falsehood."

Gentlemen, if you learn this sentence by heart, you suddenly have grown by a whole foot in stature.

"You may attract by your talents and character the needs others have of you. But the attempt to attract directly is the beginning of falsehood."

Now if a man would ama- -- imitate Jesus, he would try to attract, you see, make an attempt to attract directly. To become pleasant in the eyes of God, pleasing directly. That is the beginning of falsehood. Now listen to this, what comes now.

"... You were sent into the world to decorate and honor that poverty, that singularity, that destitution," that's the world, "by your tranquil acceptance of it -- you were sent into the world to decorate and honor that poverty, that singularity, that destitution, by your tranquil acceptance of it. If a man is capable of such steadfastness, though we see no fruit to his labor, the seed will not die. His son, or his son's son may yet thank his sublime faith and find in the third generation the slow, sure maturation. Let us sit here contented with our poverty from youth to age, rather than adorn ourselves with any red rag, or false church, or false association. It is our homage to truth which is honored by our abstaining, not by our super-servicableness."

So what is the Holy Spirit, gentlemen? It is the Holy Spirit that forbade Jesus to call Himself the Messiah in His lifetime. It is the Holy Spirit that condemned Him to be crucified and betrayed by Judas Iscariot, because in order to fulfill His message, He had to -- to take 12 apostles and to live deliberately the life of a divine creature before Him. He had to pay the penalty that one of them had to betray Him. Gentlemen, if you on purpose do such a thing, you always have to pay a price. This is a very deep secret, perhaps too deep for you at this moment, gentlemen. But I only want to know you that the spirit reveals strange secrets. The guilt of Jesus, if there is a guilt, is that in order to save mankind, He made a deliberate attempt, and therefore exposed himself to the fact that if you deliberately choose 12 apostles, you cannot complain if one betrays you. That's just human liberty. He knew it, all the time.

It's very serious that I say these things, gentlemen. You don't hear them in -- in Sunday school. You have -- Christianity has been degraded to a child's play, as though here was a kind of automation of a divine spirit, just walking through and doing all this. Or you discard it totally and say it's just childish. It's neither, gentlemen. It's a very serious business. Any attempt, as -- as Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson has said, any attempt to attract directly is the beginning of falsehood. You live in such a world, gentlemen, where everybody seems to be allowed to make direct attempts to win friends, you see. Benjamin Franklin is the greatest scoundrel in this respect. He even tells you how to do it, in his book. He was the first American who lived by treating everybody as a potential contact. And you come to Dartmouth only to make these social contacts. You are not ashamed of

yourselves. You think that's good. It's the beginning of falsehood. Your whole life is falsified, because you don't come here for what you ge- -- have to become here as decent fellow citizens, but to make social contacts and get a good job. So the whole college here is just a cesspool of social contacts. And I have to teach in such an enterprise. It's a scandal. What do I have to do with your social contacts, and your promotion, and your advertising, and your self-candidacy for -- for -- for aggrandizement?

This is the Devil. Stalks around and -- and has turned a -- an institution in which people should become missionaries, for -- into the world, and light of the world into a social contact. And you are not even ashamed to say, "I go to Dartmouth, because it offers me social contact." You boast of it. It's very hard to talk to such people at all, gentlemen. You don't understand anything because you live on such a flat, little mildew layer of life. You don't know what real life is.

But the Holy Spirit, gentlemen, says that any deliberate attempt to attract is the beginning of falsehood. And that's why Christians must wait for the Holy Spirit. They can never say, "We know what to do." They have to make an -- put in an intermission. And although they have heard the miraculous story of Jesus and the Apostles, and the founding of the Church, that isn't what tells them what they shall do. Gentlemen, the in- -- the necessity of the third article of our faith comes from the fact that it would be short circuit, you see. And it always is in Christianity: a short circuit, if you now think you know already what you have to do. Because something has happened in the past, you don't know what you have to do, you see. You can only become the imitator of Christ if you again weigh what you shall have to do. Can you see this? It's very simple.

This is therefore the whole meaning of this difficult third article, which in all times, especially in this last Christian religious revival of the last 10 years, this Republican upsurge, you see, to cover up an inflation, that this revival -- revivalist inflation of religion, you see, has tried again to do with Christ, without the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit does not go to the old churches, but it does new things, perhaps with the support of the old church. It may be. But certainly only by relieving them from pressure, by doing something that will make their existence more understandable because people say that today too it works miracles. And something is done which hasn't been done before.

The Holy Spirit, gentlemen, is then this hiatus between what we know and what we not know, between what I said, the visible and the invisible Church. Nobody belongs to the living God who doesn't make this distinction between that which is already visible, and audible, and formulated, you see -- and that which is invisible, and inaudible, and informulated. Can you see this? You must get to the point where you are standing right at the point where the two worlds

of the past and the future meet. You must honor the whole past, because God hasn't left Himself without witnesses in the past, you see. And on the other hand, you must testify to the fact that He's still in coming. If you can't live both, you can't know what a creature is. A creature is somebody who knows that the creation already has taken place before him. It doesn't begin today. And that's your distinction be -- form -- you are not revolutionaries. A revolutionary says, "All history has been a sequence of class wars. Now we take the first step into real history, because class wars are behind us." A decent fellow says, "That's nonsense." From the very beginning, people have been able to do right. And therefore, we have to do right, too. But we can't do right if we only imitate, or if we only listen to the future. There must be a meeting of two spirits in our own heart. And this takes time. The Holy Spirit, gentlemen, is always a meeting of at least two hearts, or two spirits. There is no Holy Spirit if you only take the spirit of your own time. The spirit of your own time has to meet with the spirit of your parents, or the spirit of your grandchildren. If you do something today, because the spirit moves you, and you hope that your grandchildren will benefit, you may hope that's the Holy Spirit. If you only move from passion, because Life can sell four million copies on the issue, with the headline, you obviously are only children of the very earthly, secular spirit, and have nothing to do with the Holy Spirit.

So in -- however you put it, if you understand the price paid by Christ by this little attempt, 12 men who didn't even understand, that He was betrayed by one of them, and that this was in the cards, you can learn what the Holy Spirit is. That if He had not undertaken this from love of mankind, He could have lived in the dark, incognito, and remained incognito. And this would all not have taken place, gentlemen. All deliberate attempt to falsify -- there is already the -- the danger of falsification. You have to pay a price for it. And He paid it. And He knew that He had to pay it. The greatness of Our Lord is not that He -- that He defied the laws of life, He acknowledged them. He said, "Since I have taken the 12 Apostles, I have to pay this price. They are free men, and one of them can betray me. I can't do anything about it."

This is serious business, gentlemen. Anybody who wants to understand Christianity must understand Judas. He's not just a runaway slave. He's not just an accident of the world's history. He is the consequence when you do something deliberately. And that's always against the Holy Spirit.

Now when Mr. Emerson says that -- that -- to extend a little on this -- when he said, "You were sent into the world to decorate and honor that poverty, that singularity, that destitution by your tranquil acceptance of it. If a man is capable of such steadfastness, though he's seen no fruit to his labor, his seed will not die. His son or his son's son may yet thank his sublime faith and find in the third

generation the slow, sure maturation." Now gentlemen, that's very misleading, because Mr. Emerson talks as though it was his carnal son that is meant here. Well, it isn't true. The whole American liberal arts college is an Emersonian institution. Mr. Emerson, as you know, ceased to be a minister and lived just in his lectures this -- and, so to speak, reduced to a minimum the attempt to attract. He was an angelic character. A hundred years later, the whole curriculum of Dartmouth College and all the other hundreds of colleges in the land are Emersonian institutions. In other words, when he said, "You will find in the third generation the slow, sure maturation," the Holy Spirit has worked. In the 19th century. It's here. He has created this college in which you sit here. That's all Emerson. And it is only because he did not sell it. He didn't organize it. He had -- didn't hire a coordinator. He didn't give dinners through agents, as the churches today do, and all these horrible ways of getting money. Nothing of the kind. He just was who he was, a man living in Concord, the sage of Concord. And what was in his mind is now in your mind, more or less. But whatever is in your mind is Emersonian. There's nothing else in a liberal arts college today in America that deserves my respect, except that it is Emersonianism.

So I only want to clear up, gentlemen: the Holy Spirit is always creating children out of the spirit, and not of the loins, of the -- by the will of man. It's not a carnal son. And therefore I have to elucidate this. He in his modesty said, "His son, or his son's son may yet thank his sublime faith and find in the third generation the slow, sure maturation." The miracle introduced by Christianity is that you can beget children and grandchildren, not by the will of your body, gentlemen, but by the spirit which drives you. There are spiritual children and there are spiritual grandchildren, and there is a succession of spiritual generations ever since the first church was founded.

The problem of the Church then is spiritual succession. It's called apostolic succession, as you know. But that's the essence of the Church. Can -- although there is no physical marriage, there is no physical offspring -- can this spirit of Christ be re-begotten? If not, there is no Church, there is no Christianity, and Jesus was just a ranter. I have told you that the whole problem of Christianity is: did Christ give us a spirit? It's not interesting whether He was a great man -- inspired man. There have been many inspired men, gentlemen. They were just as inspired as He was. That's all -- all not to the point. The only point of Christianity is: did we now receive from Him the spirit? And this s- -- this paragraph of Emerson, who didn't know what he -- that he was recapitulating his own Christianity here, says "Yes." A man who does not attempt to attract, you see, can leave behind the Holy Spirit. But no organization can. And you always talk of organized religion, gentlemen. You miss totally the point. It's not the question. The question of the truth of Christianity is: do you believe in the Holy Spirit, and the Father and the Son? Everything else then falls into place. The Jewish part of

Christianity is as necessary as the Greek part. And just as you send your children to school, you must send them to church, obviously. They must pray the Psalms, and they must learn the -- the arithmetic. But you can only understand it if you know what the Holy Spirit is. Otherwise you confuse Christianity with the Church. The Church is only the bride of Christ. She's not Christ, you see. She is the female part of Him.

I don't understand how this all is lost in this country. Do you -- always want -- either want to find the Holy Spirit in the Church. Utter nonsense. Where two or three are gathered in my name, I'm with -- among them. That's the Holy Spirit. And on -- on the other hand, you want to have it all yourself. That's -- ridiculous. Who are you? Just dust, and dirt, and feces. And you really think you are the carrier of the divinity? I mean, it's just so ridiculous. I never understand these self-reliant gentlemen. Who is this self-man? When he has learned to speak, he is already dead again. All the rest -- you are just trying now to begin to understand. Do you think your opinions are of any value? But no. Man is independent, he's self-made, he -- and so on. All America is independent, and we haven't to ask for any -- any place in the -- in the sequence of generations, gentlemen. This is so ridiculous, that I don't know what to say about it. But the consequence today is very terrible. Like this boy in Cutter House who says to me that since the corporations now are taking care of you, you don't need any religion.

The Holy Spirit is something very real, gentlemen. It is the spirit of Jesus at the exp- -- on the -- at that expense which it takes to get on equal terms with Him. That is, to wait until what you know of Him, and that what you are told to be today become congruous. There is this hiatus in time. The Holy Spirit never knows immediately, because if it would know immediately, it would just have to consult the Bible; and you know the Devil also quotes scripture. This going into the Bible and already knowing what you have today tomorrow, that's impossible. Nobody can. But it doesn't mean that you should not come after -- after Christ.

You can formulate this a little bit other way, gentlemen. The problem of the Christian era is that in all previous orders of life, man begins with his own understanding. In all previous orders of life, you speak of the natural man. True -- even to today. You are -- most of you are pre-Christians in your attitude. You say, "My natural mind tells me, my reason tells me, my experience tells me. I begin then to understand the world, to explain it." Most of you think that's a good philosophical approach. You -- here, you sit and have a bull session and then you find out.

Now gentlemen, Christianity of course -- you can formulate it now, not from the part of the Holy Spirit, where you wait -- you can also look at the other side.

Christ has already died for us. He has already -- because He had to communicate His insight into the creation to us, He has taken upon Himself this -- this attempt of deliberately influencing the world, and has paid this penalty of Judas Iscariot, of his betrayal. Therefore, you are not the first man. The perfect man has already lived. All Christianity hinges on this -- on this effect, that we are the second-born men. We come after a life and a death that is between the -- nature and you. Between the mere creation of the mountains and the woods and your own creation, you see, there has interceded one case of living substance as -- in mankind, which met us, which explains, which precedes us. The only interesting thing in your relation to the past, at this moment, is only if you understand that the death of Jesus precedes your life. That's all. It's a very -- very simple thing. Your eyes, however, are open long before you have lived, because of His death. That is, we know more about life through His experience than we otherwise would ever know. And to ex- -- extrapolate this fact, that it matters that He has lived, is to be a non-Christian, is to be the denial of the, you see, anti-Christ, is to be the denial of the Christian era. The Christian era says of all antiquity, "You have not to recollect the past." You can go to Heaven obviously without knowing anything about the pyramids, anything about circumcision, anything about -- about sword dances, morris dances, Halloween, obviously. You will understand. This would be terrible. Your salvation cannot depend on it. But you would be naked. You would be a child of nature. You would not have any values, any direction, any knowledge of life if you did not cope with this preceding death that has impregnated you.

That is, gentlemen, life is explained by death. And therefore, if no death has preceded your life, it is inexplicable, because death is still ahead of you. You would still have to wait till you are dead, until you understand what life is. You -- all your assumption today is based on absolute incomplete knowledge. I mean, here you are, 19 years of age, gentlemen. What do you know about 40? What do you know about 50? What do you know about 60? How can you act wisely? You cannot. How can you judge mankind? How can you found a state? How can you write a constitution? How can you sit in a jury -- on a jury and -- and -- and -- and try the Rosenbergs' case? How could you? You don't know nothing. You are all just absolutely impotent to know anything which deals with things you have lived through.

Now all these changes, gentlemen, if the complete life of one man is already there, { } opens your eyes. And we all are in this strange position, that we know everything, without having lived it just from sympathy, from suffering with somebody who has faced the fullness of all -- every{thing} that we know of. And this is the whole problem, gentlemen, of your arrangement --. Anybody lives in the Christian era who says that he knows through the eyes of the Lord. If you accept this, you are Christian. That is the famous baptism by fire. It is not by

water. Water is an accident. You will then want to have your water, too.

One day you finally find yourself in an impasse and say, "I know absolutely nothing. I have no direction. I don't know where I'm going." And you all are in this position, gentlemen, obviously. We all are. And you have to re-direct your steps, because you are reminded that death itself is an action, not something to be escaped {from}, but something to be made fruitful, you see. It has been said, I think I told you this -- Socrates taught people how to die, but Jesus taught us the meaning of dying. That's something absolutely different. Now in this college, and in all decent humanistic, free-mason, enlightened societies, as you know, Socrates, has taken the place of -- of -- of Christ. Everybody says, "Well, Socrates did just as bravely as Jesus on the Cross." I tell you, he did much more bravely. Jesus thought it was no good idea to be brave on the Cross. He wept, and He sweated, and he said, "God has forsaken me." Socrates never said this. He said, "I'm just not going to die." And with his self-hypnotism, he proceeded to the end.

Well, my dear friends, I grew up perhaps more than you in a -- in a society in which Socrates had totally taken the place of Jesus. Because both were dying. Both were innocent. And so people very simply said, "Well, we don't need any religion. We have philosophy." And that's very -- very -- all over the place. Most people today still think that Socrates is a good second savior. There is just this slight difference, gentlemen: that when it comes to Socrates, the only thing we can learn from him is how to die. But you don't know the importance of death for life. That life begets new -- death begets new life. The whole problem is -- in Christianity is the opposite from the Socratic problem: that the man who fears most, may -- die the most fruitful death. It is no counter -- no counter-indication against the man that he trembles, that he fears. That's very human. But what for does he fear? If he trembles from -- for fear of God, or for fear of man? { } But you want in this age of anxiety, you think it is wonderful to be a stoic, and not to tremble, and so you are all little Socrateses, in the -- in the nutshell.

Then you do not know what Christianity is -- came into the world. Christianity did not come into the world to teach anything. It is not a doctrine. It came, as you know, to reveal something: the connection of death and life. You cannot have life without death. A decent person is not interested in his own death. My -- dear friends, I'm now so -- so old, could be your grandfather, but I'm not interested obviously in death -- in my own death. But I'm very interested in the death that preceded me. I know from my parents' death quite a bit, but I know much more still from the death of the one man who made His death an investment, a real investment, and said, "Out of my death springs light. And it is worth my death that other people may have direction, and understand what is important, and what is valued and what is fruitful." From a death well-lived, gentlemen, or well-died, just as ever you like it, you receive the consequ- -- the consecutiveness

of seed and harvest.

Now, the strange thing about humanity is, gentlemen, that one man's life is the seed, and the other is the harvest. Man is a little more complicated, as you know, than the grain. In the case of the grain, the s- -- one seed is the same as -- as the -- the -- the ear that comes out of it. You can trace it physically, you see. The strange thing about you and me is that if I bear fruit, it would be fruit in other -- men's bodies, in your bodies, perhaps, as my students or somebody, not in myself. That is, gentlemen, the -- the sequence, the series of semination and fruit-bearing in the human race -- and that's -- is the difference between nature and you and me -- is in history, the seasons are distributed among four generations. In nature -- winter, spring, summer, fall hits the same substance. In your and my case, it doesn't. Isn't that quite interesting? It's a very simple thing, once you understand it.

The problem of humanity, gentlemen, is that it is cre- -- that creature, in the natural history of mankind, in the Linnaean world of plants, and animals, and stones -- we are that strange creature in which the seasons are distributed among different individuals, different specimens. It's quite simple. You can put it in terms of good zoology. Christianity has always felt closer, gentlemen, to zoologists than to idealists. Christianity is not idealism. I -- the Socrates says, "Oh, I do not die. My mind is so immortal, I live on." If you read anything of Plato, it's just -- makes me laugh, I mean, this denial of real death. There is no death. Jesus says, "This is terrible. Death is terrible. But I come to life in other people." So Paul and Peter then said, "We have put on the Lord Jesus." They have put him on, meaning that in their generation, they are Christ, again. In every generation the people -- there are living people who are Christ today, in many more than just two Apostles or four Apostles, or three Evangelists. But you have to learn the -- the -- the -- the zoological, the evolutionary, the biological -- put it as crudely as you can -- the realistic, the physical problem of Christianity is the recognition that death is a hinge between generations, and that therefore, if a man well dies, like the soldiers on the battlefield, they beget the new order of America. Didn't they, in Valley Forge? Isn't it obvious?

That's why we have to call -- speak of the soul, gentlemen. The soul is that process by which generations are hinged, by which it is no -- absolutely true that one generation suffers and the -- second generation harvests. You all believe this, gentlemen, but you have never given it a thought. You think that a Christian is an idealist. You even speak of philosophy -- Christianity as a philosophy. Gentlemen, it is an onslaught on philosophy! It laughs at philosophers. Philosophers are sterile people who write books. Do they beget new generations out of the spirit? People who are not even blood relations, or not even students, but who -- who are so inflamed that they carry out what the first people suffered for as

martyrs?

The whole problem of the Church is then this recognition: that when man was created, thousands of years ago, he was a very strange, new biological spec- -- species. The species in which the seasons of production, the seasons of harvest and fruit, the seasons of begetting and conceiving, are laid out for more than one generation. I am not my own fruit-bearer, so to speak, gentlemen. If I make a mistake and I, for example, learn that this was a mistake, I have my {spot.} I have burned my fingers, have I not? So I am not longer able to get innocent out of it, you see. If a girl surrenders to some promiscuous college meeting, and she learns by bitter experience that she shouldn't, it's all done. But she can perhaps reform somebody else's ways and say, "Don't do it," and by her love and -- not by her saying "Don't do it," that doesn't work, as you well know -- but by her example, she may prevent -- she may produce this clothing of all these terrible institutions which we call girls' colleges, which could very well disappear from the surface of the globe and -- be openly called something else.

Perhaps the word "dayclub" would be, instead of "nightclub."

Now -- this is simply the -- the story of mankind, gentlemen, the relation of the generations on this earth. That's why the first -- the Old Testament speaks of the generations of mankind, and that's why Matthew begins with a genealogy again, and says, every 15 generations, a new tribe of men is created. Modern people don't read the "begets" chapters. The Dartmouth Bible even omits it as boring. All liberals, you see, are Socratics, and my friend {Walt Chamberlain} here is an idealist, and so he cuts it out of his Dartmouth Bible, the -- the most interesting chapter in the New Testament, the first chapter of Matthew, in which the New Testament begins. Because the New Testament begins with the creation once more, and says, "This is the book of genesis." The Greek word is "genesis" for Matthew -- in Matthew. "This is the book of genesis." And mankind is so construed that after 15 generations, or 14 generations in Matthew, the seed is exhausted of one species -- species of man. So there is one sequence from Adam to Noah. And then there is one sequence from Noah to Abraham. And then there is one sequence from Abraham to Moses. And then there is one sequence from Moses to David. And then there is one sequence from David to the destruction of the temple. And now the time for a new beginning, a new seed is necessary, because the type has been exhausted.

Well, only to show you, gentlemen, that all this talk, by which you stifle your understanding of reality, between materialism and idealism, doesn't exist for a decent thinker. If I have to choose, I certainly am materialist, because I believe in flesh and blood, in real people. I don't believe in ideals. And Jesus didn't believe in ideals. He wouldn't have had to -- gone to the -- Cross. Idealists aren't cruci-

fied, gentlemen. But you are absolutely unable to see the difference between the incarnation of the spirit through five or a thousand generations and this empty idealism of a man who daydreams, and thinks up a better world than the one God -- created by God Almighty.

You all have -- take it upon yourself to improve on God's world, which is an insolence. It is the most perfect world as God created it. It is very difficult to understand it, I grant you. But it's very simple to enter it through suffering and tears, and sweat and toil, which you will not do. You say, "This is a wicked world. How could God admit all these sufferings? I create a better world." And then you create movies. Yes, that's what you do. You always improve on God's world, before you even know what it is. There is nothing better than God's world, and the secret of God's world is that He is very patient, that He blesses the generations of man in the thousandth generation, in those who have -- who have fear of Him and try to understand His ways. But He visits His wrath on the generations of man who -- who do not ask for direction from Him. And where do you get direction, gentlemen? Only from the people who have died before us. Death is the taskmaster of life. The animal cannot learn from any other animal that has died. We don't run away from death. We can -- and all generations of man have tried to learn from death, you see. Think of the tribes. They overdid it, you see. They -- they believed every superstition that so happened -- their ancestor had followed and have to carry it on. Or the Egyptians. They learned from the imperishable stars, from the world that didn't die, from the diamonds, from the gold, from the silver, from the -- therefore they set their people on thrones. They worshiped the firmament. They built pyramids. Always this respect for the undying. You sing a song, "Dartmouth Undying," and the consequence is that -- that you cannot reform Dartmouth College, because you think it has to be the granite of New Hampshire, never changing.

So death is in everybody's mind, only the right -- relation to death is still questioned, you see. You try to circumvent it. Christianity says, "We invest in death. The tears of the martyrs, the shout from the Cross will shake up people." If it doesn't, it is no good anymore. That's why Mr. Orozco painted this tremendous fresco, gentlemen. He said the sympathy with the suffering of Jesus seems to be exhausted. So the living spirit of God today has to descend from the Cross and to crucify the Cross, as St. Augustine already called it. And so he cuts it down and says it doesn't work anymore. People are not -- think it's wonderful to have a suffering Christ and they don't try to avoid it, anymore. They're -- His death doesn't impress them anymore. If you go into the basement of -- of -- of Dartmouth College, you see this last, desperate attempt of a good Christian to make you understand the fruitfulness of -- of death. It's a very profound -- profound picture. He says, "It doesn't work, anymore." People a hundred years ago would do something, lest Christ suffer. Today that's -- already has become

an empty phrase. It has been given to the children, and to the women and -- and grown-up men are -- just are no longer impressed.

We live in this very dangerous age, gentlemen, in which the whole food of the tradition of mankind has been given to the babes and sucklings only, and has become this candy stuff for Sunday school, which makes it absolutely impossible to assign him any importance. I cannot, for the life of me, if I think of these Sunday schools, do anything but -- but vomit all my Christian tradition. It is too ridiculous. It's too cheap. It's too shoddy. When I then look in the other direction, forget all about the deprivation of the churches, then I know that nothing greater has been done to my life, and to my spirit, and to my understanding. But we are in a terrible dilemma today. Perhaps I may express this problem of the spirit, gentlemen, in this famous sentence by the dean of St. Paul's in London: that the Devil always trans- -- changes the content of the bottles, but he never changes the labels. The Devil always changes the content of the bottles, but he never changes the labels.

So you have to find today where the Church is. It is obviously not so simple to say that the Church is what calls itself the Church. The Church is real, but whether the churches -- our church is a church, that's a very doubtful proposition. You have to find out yourself. Everyone in your -- his own right. Because since the days of Christ, gentlemen, and probably from the beginning of time, people have learned their lesson by somebody else's death. And wherever this has been, people have believed that death is not the end, but the beginning of life. And wherever they have believed this, they have believed in the resurrection of the flesh. And wherever they have believed in the resurrection of the flesh, there has been the Church. It is the other way around. That is, you first experience these things.

Now gentlemen, there are -- to make it very simple, there are -- in the history of the last 1900 years is a way of understanding the march of the spirit through the world. If you take the year 0 as the coming of the new spirit of creation, of recreation, into this world, or as I tried to tell you, to say creation is now, you cannot rely on 4,000 years backward on the pyramids, you see, or on the Roman Empire. Creation is now.

If this is the problem, to connect all the generations of man, inasfar as they believe that they are at this moment created, that they can't go back to ideals of their own making, they can't go to textbooks and schoolbooks, but it is now that they are to be created, and that they are illuminated and able to know what it means to be created, because their eyes are opened to what already has been created, the d- -- the destiny of man has already appeared. We already know that the solidarity of the human race is the meaning of mankind, that here is an

animal that, compared to the elephant, or compared to the ant, is destined to be one over the whole globe. That's, by and large, the determination of you and me in zoological terms, you see. An oak tree is -- is an oak in -- in one country, and another oak in another, and this is a variety. We are not simply variety of the animal type, but we are destined to become one man over the whole globe. And we are only the child -- son of God if we can move all men as one man through the ages.

If you can say that you are Adam, and if you can say that you are a new- -- new-born son -- a brother of -- of the Lord, you are one man. You are participating in the strange idea that God never created men. He created one man. And He tries to make you and me one man from the beginning of time to the end of time. That's Christianity, by and large. One man is the son of God, not many. Jesus is not at all as Jesus of Nazareth the son of God, but as Christ. That is, of the center point through which all previous men and all later men form this one man with which God has dealings. God has no dealings with you privately. That's one of the terrible mistakes of the liberal era. You are not a private -- you see, private man in the eyes of God. You are a member of the man He created, a cell of the body. And that's why He tells you something. You can pray in vain for weeks and weeks for having a special privilege and a special revelation. You won't get it. You can find your place in the whole through prayer. But you can't find your own wishes fulfilled and get a Cadillac and a higher income through prayer. That's all just sorcery, and magic, and this -- of course, Christianity has to put up with all these superstitions around it, this incrustation. But gentlemen, you know very well that this has nothing to do with real prayer. It's just funny.

Prayer -- as Emerson, by the way, said, when he was asked to give up the chaplain service -- the chapel service in Harvard -- he was an overseer -- he said he would never vote for this abolition. He said, "Prayer is the noblest attitude of a human being. How can I vote for not giving every student a chance of exercising this -- having this great experience?" Why is prayer, gentlemen, the noblest attitude of a human being, much nobler than sitting here and listening to me? It's very simple, gentlemen. It's an attempt to get rid of your own self-will. That's prayer. As long as you pray anything for yourself, you don't pray. The only prayer that exists is: my will is not good enough to direct my own way. That's why another man's death is necessary for you and for me, too, gentlemen. Not one person who's born into this world knows his own direction. How can he? He's not connected with the life that has come before him, you see. And he doesn't know how his death will -- will influence the {pas- -- future}. Take one thing, gentlemen: making of wills. Any pagan writes wills, in volumes, in order to -- to strangle the future. He make trusts -- funds, doesn't he, to evade taxes, and he determines that his one son can inherit the money at 26, and the daughter at 21, and so on and so on. All these ridiculous paganisms that go on in America,

where people have too much money and too little faith.

Gentlemen, a man who has any faith will write no will. I had a friend who was very sick for -- nine years, and knew his -- every day could be his death. And he was very wealthy. And he said, "The only contribution to religion I can make ..." he -- made many more, was a very famous Jewish -- Jewish believer, "... the only contribution I can make is not writing a will, because that's forcing the future, having no faith. My death will bring out the best in my son and my wife, but not my testament."

A testament is an attempt, you see, to have no faith in -- in the fruit of death upon life, you understand this? It's the opposite. It's will. And all these people who write wills and say, on the other hand, not "my will be done," but "Thy will," they fool themselves. They want very much that their will be done, even after their death. That's not given to man. Jesus never did this. He gave His spirit up. As you know, the Bible says He gave it -- His spirit back to His father and said to His Apostles, "The spirit will tell you bigger things than I knew." That's faith. There's not one word of Jesus by which He prescribes anything to the Apostles. But that's your picture of Jesus, as the law-giver or as a teacher, or as any such pedant and martinet. Quite the contrary. His greatness was that He did not prescribe anything beyond His grave. But that's -- we call the Resurrection, that His spirit suddenly came to life, and every situation was different. You find no quotations of the Lord in -- in Paul, except for the institutions of the supper, when the -- Jesus already acted as though He was dead, as though it was after His death.

These are very important things, I -- because you are surrounded by misinterpretations of all these very simple truths, gentlemen, that the faith of a living creature is that you cannot organize life after your death. But you can influence it. You can create it. That's something quite different. Creation is free in every minute. You can create your son. I can create you, gentlemen. I cannot tell you. I cannot predict, you see. That would be a tyranny. There has to be a hiatus before this wakes up in you, or comes to life again. And if I try to keep the reins, you see, you will -- you will bolt, will you not? Obviously, you must.

Now we roughly divide -- what time is it, please? Oh, that is my trouble. Let's have a break here.

[Tape interruption]

... and if you look at the visible Church, at this identity of the bottle and the label, Church, you will find that the history of the Church is -- has gone through a number of phases. For the last 900 years, the main interest of mankind has -- no

longer be lodged in Church history. But in the first thousand years of our era, gentlemen, every important event is an event in ecclesiastical history. Anybody who has read the story of All Saints or All Souls -- has written it here in this -- knows this -- or Christmas.

So gentlemen, we get the strange fact, that in the first thou- -- {if} this is the year 0, and this is assumably -- it's very rough, the year 1054, when the Greek and the Roman Church separated -- I take the year of the Schism. Could also take the year of the Crusades, it doesn't matter -- and if you take this year 1956, or 2000, which in the eyes of God probably makes very little difference, the visible Church, that is, people who are called the Church from the outside and call themselves the Church -- that would be the Church, would it not? I mean, where you have this identity of self-appellation and being called from the outside with the same name, has gone through vier -- four stages. And these four stages are, strangely enough, the phases of the -- our own human existence. There are four aspects. As you remember, I tried to show you that the prophetic spirit of Israel went through the four phases of the Mosaic books, of the historical books, of the prophetic books, and of the books of wisdom; and that each time, it was the same spirit. It had to be restored, however, in a different aspect. I have tried to show you that in Egypt, this is also true, that the spirit of Horus had to -- then to undergo this interest: eliminating the special role of Pharaoh, and speaking of Ra, as shining for Egyp- -- for all the Egyptians and then going over to Osiris, and going -- ending up in the restoration of the pre-Egyptian animal cult, of the totems, of the Apis bull; to get nearer to the people, to make, so to speak, this heavy burden of building the pyramids and living under this imperial discipline more palatable to all.

And now, in the same sense, gentlemen, the Church today is open to everybody. Even the Catholic Church talks now about the lay apostolate. And today the great interest is not in the Apostles, but in the last church taxpayer. That is, it is very similar as in Egypt, and in -- in Judaism. We are now fighting on the last -- at the last ditch, where the Church can be identified with this little grain of faith in the last old woman, or baby. That is a state of nature. And very much like the Apis bull represents, the last phase of the visible church -- visible Egypt, visible temple, I would suggest that since the Reformation, the visible Church has become very much a kind of nature among natures. If you read books today, they take the Church for granted as something just -- odd institution inside the rest of the world. It's just one of those shells, and one of these fac- -- artifacts or facts of life with which the -- the secular brain has to cope.

I got a paper the other day in which a man just assumed that nobody today could become a Chris- -- could be a Christian in good faith. Well, quite a remarkable fellow, this gentleman. And obviously he mistook the visible Church for the

living faith, that of course could survive without these forms of nature.

Well, if you take the first 500 years of the Church, gentlemen, you will understand that there was nothing of the kind. The soul -- the -- anybody who belonged to the Christian Church clearly did not belong to the world. It was not -- nothing natural. The Church was absolutely supernatural. You couldn't call the pope somebody that a Protestant leader had to make by going -- flying to Rome and asking for an interview with the pope, because you didn't want to be seen with St. Peter and his successors, because it would entail martyrdom. You would be killed right away. I mean, the -- the -- the Protestants in this country contribute very much to this decay of the visible Church by visiting the pope. If they would still hate him, it would do him a lot of good, you know. He would still be a supernatural force, but since they all now try -- ask for an interview, I think -- even Mr. Kelly, Sr. had he an interview? The Prince of Monaco?

[unintelligible]

Wie?

(Yes.)

Well, gentlemen, that's the end. There's nothing -- any spiritual or supernatural or anything about it. It is just childish, absolutely childish. The poor man. The Archbishop of Westminster, in England, the Catholic archbishop -- the Roman Catholic archbishop, said a few years ago that the -- the pope in Rome by now was just a tottering old man. That's all he could be, because the world has engulfed him. He tries desperately not to be engulfed, but they make him into just a showpiece, into Exhibit A.

If -- well, I won't go into -- into this. But gentlemen, down to 50- -- 500 was dangerous to be a Christian. From 500 to 1000, the Church saved the pagan civilization of antiquity in a new world of barbarous -- barbarians, so it became a cultural institution. And therefore, the church of the martyrs was spelled by the church of what we call the Roman -- Romanesque -- Romanesque era, the church of the manuscripts, of the monasteries; the church of the -- who knew how to make glass, and how to plant wine, and how to build houses -- the church of -- of tradition, what you think the Church is, by and large. The Church also of superior knowledge. And this is a great break. I put here the year 500. Again, it's very crude, but it may help you to understand the relation of the same force. The Church did not change, but people looked at it through different eyes. A -- a -- a Roman of 300 was jealous of the Church, you see, because she threatened the empire, you see. A Christian -- a -- a Frank of 700, under Charlemagne, was looking yearningly to the Church, because she -- enabled Charlemagne to

improve a little bit his legislation, or his education -- the education of his subjects, or to his -- the instruction of his civil service. Now, the way you are looked upon from the outside very much makes you.

I've written an essay years, years ago, "The World from The Viewpoint of The Church." And I tried to show that -- will reverse the process and the Church from the viewpoint of the world. Well, in the Roman Empire, the Church was looked upon as subversive, and much more subversive than Communism, of course. The end of the world. And it was the end of the world. And it meant to be the end of the world. No mercy. Absolutely subversive. If you wanted -- want to be a Christian in your soul, you have to be subversive, or you at least have not to care to be called subversive. It must be a matter of total indifference to you. You are not. You want to be -- use socialistic cures, you all say. Then you cannot have a soul. A soul is always dying. Nobody in -- in -- in -- in General Motors wants to have people with a soul. They all want to have people who conform. That's the opposite from a soul. Soul is absolutely incalculable, and unpredictable. And these people want to have predictable vice-presidents. Otherwise they wouldn't make them into vice-presidents.

Predictability is all that is paid for in life. You see, we never get paid for our soul. We always get -- paid for our routines, because that's the only thing they can pre-calculate. I can get paid, gentlemen, for standing here and from 12 -- 1:25 to 2- -- 3 o'clock, they cannot pay me for what I say in this day -- in these hours. They can only pay me for the routine that somebody stands here and mumber -- and murmurs -- and mumbles something and -- and you go to sleep. And they pay exactly the same salary for a man who puts you to sleep and a man who wakes you up. No different.

Soul is unpayable, gentlemen. That's always the price of the catacombs, of the incognito, of the anonymous, of the not-yet value -- valuable. It has no price. You can never pay for the soul. That's why the psychoanalyst, by his very existence, denies the soul, because he gets paid. You can only pay for services that have nothing to do with the soul.

Now comes the culture. For this you can pay. You can endow the Church. You can make her very rich, as they, well, became. {They became terribly rich}, as you know, because they were the source of all information, of all Encyclopedias Britannica. They wrote all the books, you see. They built all the roads. They knew everything. But it's a very different world. Still -- the Church still had soul, because it still converted heathen, and these heathens, they chopped off the heads of the missionaries, as in Mr. Thomas -- T.S. Eliot's Cocktail Party, she is eaten by the cannibals, you see. The young lady. You remember? Have you read it? Oh, remarkable. I thought everybody had to read The Cocktail Party. I think

it's a horrible play, but it's T.S. Eliot, so he can't do any wrong. Don't read it.

Well, in this Cocktail Party, however, my dear men, there is a lady who has -- decides to convert the {cannibals} -- {tribe} and the cannibals don't like the idea. So they have a good breakfast of her. And -- and that's by and large, even during the time that the Church was the -- already for the converted parts of the globe a cultural institution. As long as the Church still has martyrs in their -- her mission, she is still alive to her first phase, where everybody was against her. Now some still are against her, you see. And wherever she is still in a mission position, she is still in her first phase; and wherever she is already the great -- great, great cultural dignitary, she is on her second phase. Then comes, as you know, the times of -- well, you don't know -- the times of Thomas Aquinas, and scholasticism, and what most people who stem from Ireland think is the Church. And -- that is a mental thing, where theology has eaten up the Church, where theology is equated with the Church, gentlemen. When I say "mind," I could also have said "theology." Very few Roman Catholics, gentlemen, make this distinction between religion, and theology, and faith. There are three things. The soul has faith. The cultural institution has religion. But the mental -- mentally trained scholastic has theology. And they are three very different things indeed.

I once met in {Camp Shanks} a group of -- of -- a rabbi, a Protestant -- two Protestant ministers, and a Catholic priest, and one Catholic student of Manhattan College. And this Manhattan College student knew everything of Thomism. He rattled off all the arguments for the existence of God. And it was clear that he was the only absolutely godless person in the room. Absolutely godless, because he thought he knew God. Then you have no relation to God anymore. He's dead. Theol- -- theology is the enemy of faith and religion, gentlemen, and it's the most import- -- vital and poisonous enemy of religion and faith, because it thinks about these things. And if you think about them --. In the Middle Ages, that was no danger; anybody who was then a theologian, gentlemen, was a priest and heard confession, and had taken the three vows of chastity, and -- and obedience, and poverty. So he paid every day, first by faith, you see, and then by religion, and then he was allowed in addition a little theology. But modern people take the -- have the insolence of knowing everything about a way of life on which they have not embarked. And of course, that's nothing.

And so the mental church, gentlemen, the church of the schools, the church of theology then became, as you know, in the Reformation, the church against which the wrath of the reformers turned, and in their hatred of the scholastic church, they knocked over also parts of the church of faith and religion.

We haven't to go into this at this moment. I only want to tell you that I think it is wise to see -- in this denominational chaos today, with 287 denominations in

America alone, that the Church today is looked upon from the outside, just in a matter-of-fact way. Nobody who meets today a building called "the Church" sees anything except a problem in real estate in it. That is, if you belong to one church, you do not care for the life of the 286 other denominations, really. That's their business, is it not? So in 98 percent of -- the rest of the Church is no longer inside of you. You -- you are not responsible for it at all. Somebody else. That makes it for the majority of modern, living people -- makes the Church into a -- just a fact of nature. What do we call then "natural"? Something that is outside of us, and that exists independently from us, you see, that is there; whether we say "yes" or "no" to it, we can't change it.

So nature is nothing aggressive, of course. I don't mean to -- to say anything of moral turpitude, here, but I -- what I mean to say is that in the eyes of most people, through the breaking-up of the denom- -- into denominations, the Church has become a fact of nature. You may still have your own tender tie with one church, but you cannot help feeling that you are not responsible for the Abyssinian Church; you are not responsible for the Jehovah's Witnesses; you are not responsible for the Mormons; you are not -- not -- not -- not. Now, the nots have it, you see. In a sense, it is very difficult to have a point of view that it -- this is outside of you for 286 denominations, and to be terribly hot for one, you see, and not a little bit getting out of balance and saying, "For most practical purposes, the Church is simply a fact." A fact. Now facts are natural, gentlemen. Facts are without value -- judgments, they are just there, aren't they? I mean, and through -- that's how we live, today. The papal state of the popes, from 18- -- 1517 to 1870 made it necessary for all the Protestants to treat the pope just as a temporal power, which is another expression for nature, you see. He's just natural.

Now this is -- is the story, then. Of course, any living being, anybody who has taken my course in Philosophy 9 has heard this before -- anybody who lives through these four phases only fulfills what we all are created -- into as creatures. We all have a soul, that is -- a risky future, which is unknown, invisible, and called into being tomorrow. We are still -- have not yet incarnated. The soul is the carrier of the growing point, of -- is the receptacle for the Holy Spirit, is still receiving new directions. You could put the -- the problem very simply: anybody who has still an unknown future is, for this purpose, called a soul. Anybody who has already a known place in -- in life is cultural, has a role, as I -- you'll remember in Philosophy 9, we have talked about this. Anybody who has a mind of his own occupies inside himself a special self-consciousness, a special consciousness. He develops his own -- his own judgment, his own opinion, his own philosophy about the world. And anybody who has to fight for his very existence in the world at large, against all kinds of enemies has to have a nature. Our Lord also had to eat, and He also had a nature. And He had a mind, of course, and He had

a soul, and He had a -- His tradition, his role in -- as the son of Joseph and Mary, and as the descendant of David.

So don't mistake me. We all have these strange qualities. What we call "the Church," gentlemen, is humanity written large, or concentrated. The Church is nothing but the revelation of your and my nature, and character. That we consist of these four elements therefore is, of course, represented in the Church. The Church is nothing superstitious. It is nothing outside of you and me. It is nothing but you and me, revealed. We call this revelation. That is, the veil of your existence is withdrawn, and you can see yourself in the light of this order. And it is also nothing very special, that these four aspects come to the fore in centuries one more than the other. So will you kindly not misinterpret this?

The Church of the 500 years stressed its future -- or her future. The Church of the next 500 years stressed its connection with the whole past of mankind. Philosophers of old, prophets of old, the Old Testament, the melting pot, everything you see. So she said, "I'm from the beginning. I'm with you. I'm not allowing anything to be destroyed that went on before." Then she becomes self-conscious. And she rises to the teaching church. That is, she -- I call this "inwardizes." She reflects on her own existence, what we call self-conscious. You see, we -- we speculate about our own existence. The Church renders accounts of why she is there, why the world is there, how the world operates, all things the old fathers of the Church never had touched upon. You get a theology. And those of you who have taken Philosophy 10 will know that the word "theology" in this new sense is not older than the year of the Lord 1125. Theology is a creation of late days of the Church. The Church has called Plato a theologus -- a theologian, because he was not a Christian, and he had to know something about the many gods. Plato, for the old fathers of the Church, is theologian. And they tried to be apostles, and martyrs, and missionaries, and confessors, and evangelists, but certainly not theologians. It was no compliment to be a theologian in the first thousand years of the -- of the life of the Church. The only man who ever was called a theologus -- St. John -- was called it for being such a wonderful liturgist, being able to praise the Lord in -- in -- in the liturgy of the Church to such perfection. So the word had nothing to do with your use of the word "theology."

I think that's very important for you. What I -- have to say is that -- the the Church has undergone in 2,000 years a similar revolution, a similar turnover, a similar movement offering to its faithful and to the world at large four different aspects of its -- of its full nature, that we have met with before in other such great creations of the cosmic order of man. And it would be wrong, I think, and cowardly, if we would not see: this is the mortal aspect of the Church. The nature of the Church condemns it to die, because all nature -- you asked me this, question, didn't you? All -- no, you asked me -- all nature must die. It is the

essence of the natural that it is mortal, you see. It has to die. Man escapes death if he links up with other generations of man. I tried to tell you this before, you see. With our nature, you see, we must die. But if we are only one season, in the sequence of seed and fruit, then we don't have to die. Man is not immortal in the -- the ridiculous sense of the Greeks, that man just didn't die, and the mind went on forever, you see. This immortality doesn't exist. But life can die in me and rise in you. That's all we have.

So I would -- I would suggest, gentlemen, that you understand that we are in the midst of a tremendous, real universal history. Who cares for the French history, or for English history, as you are brought up, gentlemen? This secular story. They are of no importance, if you compare to this tremendous 2,000 years of organized -- of life in the form of the Holy Spirit, of this power to connect more than one generation of man to the same -- in the same spirit, to bear fruit, where one generation sows, and the other harvests. This has not existed before, and it is threatened today. The fact that the Church today is -- is treated more and more as just nature, as a building in the town, you see, with a { }, with a sign, and its advertising, just as other institutions, you see, and -- and just competing with the movies and so on, shows that this church is in great danger. If it is natural, it is -- must die, as all natural things must die. It has a limited span of existence. But if you see the whole story of the Church, the thing is a little more complicated. All the qualities of life are there. Inasfar as the Church is the human soul written large, gentlemen, it only dies in order to rise again. The problem of your and my life is that your death can be the beginning of a glorious life in somebody else. If you understand that your life is dying all the time, that every sacrifice, every -- renunciation you make can be called your death and another person's birth. We beget all the time, with every renunciation, gentlemen.

One of you told me the story that he was tempted to go with the choir out to California, and instead he stuck with his fraternity and -- and played in the competition of the plays, and they got the prize. And if he had broken out, they couldn't have gotten the prize. The little action was very important to me, when he told me this, because without his saying anything about it, the decision which he had to make was plus and minus for himself. The trip to California was for him a plus. The not-going to California was a minus. But his minus produced a plus. This is, by and large, the interaction, gentlemen, of one man and humanity, that your voluntary- -- -teering for paying a price for the interconnecting of the generations, or the various classes of mankind, the various nations immediately recoils and produces in effect a surplus in somebody else.

Now the story of the Church is simply this -- may I -- may I still add this, gentlemen? The -- the Sermon on the Mount, or the whole story of the Christian era is simply this: that this interconnecting between the generations, this strange

species which we are -- that we only exist as men, as human beings, if we deny our animal existence, if you deny that your death is the end, that you can only cooperate in the history of mankind by believing in this cooperation. If you understand that -- among men, this has -- be done explicitly. The difference between human life, gentlemen, and animal life, is that animals don't have to do anything explicitly. But we have to do it explicitly. I don't know -- there are many other words I could use. I -- at this moment I like to stress: explicitly we have to stick to the sequence of generations. When a man stays married and doesn't run off with another wife, which would be very tempting in itself to do, if he only considers his own existence, gentlemen. And he does this for the next generation. The sacrament of marriage has nothing to do with the relation of one man and one woman, but it is absolutely necessary, if you want to make the next generation realize the peace that can exist between two sexes.

If you do not marry, gentlemen, you expose the young to Freud. Freud is the exploitation of divorce in Vienna, of -- of -- of mistresses had by husbands, and of -- lovers had by mothers. These poor children, of course, were deprived of the unity and the peace among the two sexes in the previous generation. If you want to have the outstanding example, gentlemen, of how the generations are connected from the first of creation, it is, that for children, in their first 15 years of life, and you testify, most of you that I am simply right, from your own experience, that in the -- for the 15-year-old child, the father and the mother form a unity, and they are only two -- two members of this unity. And usually the mother says what the parents have decided, or -- it was sometimes perhaps the father is on more intimate terms with you and tells you what your -- the mother has spoken of with him. But they appear to the children as one generation that has succeeded.

Now what I have tried to say to you about the death of Christ on the Cross is exactly the same in the life of the species, with regard to parents. The old tribes also participated in the creation of the Church. The -- Christ couldn't have come if not at first there had been this one specimen of peace-making in one generation, so that the next generation could inherit the -- this peace, and could grow up with this tremendous certainty any good, married couple bequeaths to its children, that the parents -- children feel secure. They know that they can marry, too. Anybody who -- who comes from a happy marriage never gives up the hope that he might find a real marriage peace, too. He may never find it, but he has seen it. It is there.

And that's a part of the Church, gentlemen. Don't think that the married couples of the ancient world are not elements -- very definite elements of the Christian Church. The Christian Church is much older than Christ. Christ only has made these things total and explicit. One of your great handicaps today is

that you try desperately to limit, to restrict the necessity of linking up the generations through the Spirit, without -- regardless of nations, and regardless of politics, and regardless of -- of languages and so on -- and races, that you limit this to this, what you think the Church is -- to these shoddy buildings of Methodists, of Congregationalists, or Episcopalians, or Roman Catholics, and -- that is not the Church. But the Church is the power of any generation to harvest the fruits of previous generations and to sow the seeds of future generations. And a marriage, for example, does this. And therefore it's called a sacrament in many churches, because it bestows on the children something they cannot give themselves. The Church is the residue of all the things that nature cannot give. My nature cannot give me this experience that my parents were well-married, and that it is possible to get well-married, because as long as you are in sex trouble as young people, you don't think that's possible. You are haunted. And therefore, somebody has to put the example before you and say, "That's not true." There is a way out. There is a solution, and a very fine one, and a real, creative one.

You can bestow peace on the next generation, but under one condition, gentlemen: that you sacrifice. Certain arbitrariness of -- of going on with every woman, you have to give up. You have to stick to one. Otherwise, you can't bestow on your children this experience that every generation can receive strengthening, power, from the previous generation.

Now, I take it -- this is one of the secrets that still is alive in this country. The sacrament of marriage is much wider spread than the divorce figures show. But it is not ex- -- made explicit. The Church makes this explicit, because at this moment, gentlemen, if you and I don't become explicit Christians and again say that marriage is part of this wonderful process of creating one man through the ages, it will be lost. Marriage cannot live by its own. It is isolated today; it's the hand of these Freudians, these -- these devils, who have themselves paid for work on the soul, like dentists, and that's forbidden. You can pay for work on the body. You cannot work for pay -- for money for work on the soul. Now, they deny the soul. They say you have just a psyche. It's very dangerous.

Now my -- my lesson today was, gentlemen: the Church is explicit. Many good things have been created all over the earth before. I have tried to give you examples in all this story, you see. If you do not know the central problem of linking the generations, by renouncing in one generation what you possibly might do for the sake of the next generation, all these minor achievements will be lost, too. Explicit knowledge of the secret of the revelation, and the explicit relation to the death that has created your life, that has directed your life, that has organized your life, that has illuminated your life is ne- -- necessary, because everything inexplicit is left to accident. Modern marriage is left to accident if you divorce it from Christianity, because then it seems that we can have many forms

of marriage. Why shouldn't we, you see? It cannot be seen within the meaning of all our human existence. The same is true about education. The same is true about the freedom of professions. Gentlemen, in this country, it will be -- very soon have a law by which every year so many percent have to study physics, and so many percent have to study chemistry, and they are already driving at that. And because they will say, "freedom of profession," free choice of the profession -- not at all. We will go back to Egypt. We will just arrange things. We don't need so many fathers anymore. We don't need so many colleges -- liberal arts college students. They'll go all to Rennselaer and MIT. It's coming. It's coming. They say we need 100,000 physicists a year. The Russians, the Russians, the Russians. They have 200,000 physicists a year.

Gentlemen, when -- what will you say, since you do not know what freedom is, in the universal term of sacrifice, for the rest of the race, and the peace of -- of all, through the times, you will let the freedom -- free choice of profession go, as you have allowed the sacrament of marriage to go, because it is just a fragmentary thing by itself. It will not be linked up with all the rest of your -- of your elementary facts of life, you see. So the Church, gentlemen, is nothing but the power to make explicit the relation of -- death and life -- the relation of sacrifice and -- and harvest, or -- and achievement. Without sacrifice, the next generation is lost. If at this moment, not one man is willing to throw a bomb when the Russians invade America, you are lost. Now the man who throws the bomb may be killed. He knows it. He may be shot down, before he can throw. Therefore you all depend on one man who's willing to die. You may like it or not.

And this -- this simpleton of a pacifist minister in Hanover who told me one day that he -- if his childs are -- children are kidnapped, he was such a pacifist, that he of course, couldn't do anything against the kidnapper, but he would ring up the -- the police to arrest the kidnapper. He's just the typical modern antiChristian who doesn't know that he has to take the risk of being killed in the process. He has to save his children, not the police. The police are just his substitutes. But you live in such a fools' paradise, gentlemen, pardon me -- not you yourself, but this country -- that even pacifists can afford to say such nonsense. Serious people, they think the -- man was a minister and he said he would ring up the police, as though the police had anything else but the job to substitute for his -- him. How can the police do -- arrest the kidnapper if he can't? How can they shoot the kidnapper and free the children if he cannot -- free his own children?

This is the logic, gentlemen, in which you are wrapped up. I have never understood who developed this poisonous mentality in this country. But you are surrounded by witchcraft and sorcerers. I -- I assure you, gentlemen, never has a country been so benighted, in the dark ages. Your advertisers, your psychoana-

lysts, your pacifists -- they all have wrapped you into a shroud of superstition. I have never seen so superstitious people than in this country, gentlemen. Pardon me for saying this. It's the only way in which I can describe that the Church is -- came into this world against these superstitions. The Church says, "It costs a prices to live in peace together." Every generation has to pay this price. This price is disagreeable sacrifice, the lowering of the standards of living, if it is necessary. Yes, Mr. {Mellon}. I'm sorry to say. It is not an aim in itself. It isn't. You don't know what is the aim in the -- if you concentrate on any such -- such special thing. It may be at one time. I'm not a -- as you well know, you understand.

But you have first to say explicitly that the relation between the generations comes first, because the miracle, gentlemen, of your and my species is that we do not live to ourselves and we do not die to ourselves, you see. We live to one spirit, through the ages. And therefore the Lord is the Lord of the quick and the dead. And nothing that one generation does is meaningful, has -- makes any sense, before it is not in range with the past generation and next generation. That's why you cannot walk out in Berlin, or in South Korea, now. You cannot. You would dishonor the dead, you see. That is expensive, and it certainly restricts the tax cut, but it comes first, because it makes you into a human being, to honor what has been before, and to honor what shall come after you. This is more important than any personal happiness in your own generation. And this is the relation of values that is totally lost today. You still measure your values and your happiness in terms of the other fellow of your own generation. And you say, "What he has gotten, I have gotten, too." You should reason the other way around: "My, he has gotten too much. I must ask for less." But your logic is: "He has gotten so much, I must ask for more." So you get inflation.