Author Archive
Personhood
Rosenstock-Huessy contests the ideal of a full and perfect outward authentic expression of the self:
The fiction of today is that everybody by birth is a person. That’s a very dangerous fiction. That’s why we today are in such trouble with our religious education, with our political parties, with Mr. McCarthy, with Eisenhower. It isn’t true that a man wakes up and is a person. A person is a man who can cope with opposites, who can decide when is the time for what in his life. If you are a playboy, and you don’t know when to become serious and become soldiers, you aren’t a person. You are a playboy. As we say, you see. Or when you are a brute . . . a man who is always on the warpath, I mean, who has to “fight the Japs,” . . . ? Well, he’s not a person. He’s just again a boy, a pirate, a—or a wild Westerner. Not a person.
A person is something you have completely lost sight of. . . . A person is something very clear, who . . . can decide, the mask, or the role which is on his face. . . . Persona in Latin means to sound through the mask. The person is originally the actor on the tragic scene who wears the mask of the hero, you see. And a person is that man who therefore knows when to wear one mask or the other. (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Cross of Reality, 1953, emphasis added)
The one and the many
Land, skill, and markets are eternal ways of economizing, of increasing the peace. And you cannot afford to divide history in this artificial manner and say, “This is old and obsolete, and this is now the type we do today.”
Gentlemen: capitalism, feudalism, and hermitism . . . they are equally obsolete today, all three. And they are equally inevitable today as partial solutions. That is, you can no longer afford to say there is one economy, one type of economy. . . . It is a mania to believe [that] because there is one God, there must also be one economy. One God and many economies. That’s how God created the universe. It’s ridiculous! I mean, how can anybody be a capitalist, and how can anybody be a socialist or anybody a communist; only a monomaniac can be this who mistakes the unity of the divine government and the creation of the universe with his hobby and says, “My hobby is the only way of running things.” . . .
The only answer to Communism is that there is no panacea in economics. There are innumerable ways of doing things. The earlier you wake up to this, the more you can laugh off all these issues. Communism is for a normal person not an issue, because it wants to idolize one way of doing things. And how can any normal person think that this earthly matter should be treated in one way only? God is one, and you are many, and the elements of the earth are an infinity—an infinity. And every one thing has to be taken care of in a different manner. Money has to be treated in one way, and electricity has been treated in another way. And the . . . garden has to be treated in
another way. (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Cross of Reality, 1953)
No, not one (2)
Resorting to a psychological explanation [of Peter’s denial of Jesus] is less innocent than it appears. In refusing the mimetic interpretation, in looking for the failure of Peter in purely individual causes, we attempt to demonstrate, unconsciously of course, that in Peter’s place we would have responded differently; we would not have denied Jesus. Jesus reproaches the Pharisees for an older version of the same ploy when he sees them build tombs for the prophets that their fathers killed. The spectacular demonstrations of piety toward the victims of our predecessors frequently conceal a wish to justify ourselves at their expense: “If we had lived in the time of our fathers,” the Pharisees say, “we would not have joined them in spilling the blood of the prophets.”
The children repeat the crimes of their fathers precisely because they believe they are morally superior to them. This false difference is already the mimetic illusion of modern individualism, which represents the greatest resistance to the mimetic truth that is reenacted again and again in human relations. The paradox is that the resistance itself brings about the reenactment. (René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 20)
No, not one
When Jesus declares that he does not abolish the Law but fulfills it, he articulates a logical consequence of his teaching. The goal of the Law is peace among humankind. Jesus never scorns the Law, even when it takes the form of prohibitions. Unlike modern thinkers, he knows quite well that to avoid conflicts, it is necessary to begin with prohibitions.
The disadvantage of prohibitions, however, is that they don’t finally play their role in a satisfying manner. Their primarily negative character, as St. Paul well understood, inevitably provokes in us the mimetic urge to transgress them. The best way of preventing violence does not consist in forbidding objects, or even rivalistic desire, as the tenth commandment does, but in offering to people the model that will protect them from mimetic rivalries rather than involving them in these rivalries.
Often we believe we are imitating the true God, but we are really imitating only false models of the independent self that cannot be wounded or defeated. Far from making ourselves independent and autonomous, we give ourselves over to never ending rivalries.
The commandment to imitate Jesus does not appear suddenly in a world exempt from imitation; rather it is addressed to everyone that mimetic rivalry has affected. Non-Christians imagine that to be converted they must renounce an autonomy that all people possess naturally, a freedom and independence that Jesus would like to take away from them. In reality, once we imitate Jesus, we discover that our aspiration to autonomy has always made us bow down before individuals who may not be worse than we are but who are nonetheless bad models because we cannot imitate them without falling with them into the trap of rivalries in which we are ensnarled more and more.
We feel that we are at the point of attaining autonomy as we imitate our models of power and prestige. This autonomy, however, is really nothing but a reflection of the illusions projected by our admiration for them. The more this admiration mimetically intensifies, the less aware it is of its own mimetic nature. The more “proud” and “egoistic” we are, the more enslaved we become to our mimetic models. (René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 14-15)
Less
[T]he one thing you must know [as a leader] is that you have been exalted into a position, you see, of privilege, because of an historical chain of events, which dignifies you beyond your own merits. . . . [Y]ou know that you are not up to the occasion. You are less than the quality history bestows on you. . . .
Ceremonies warn all men that they are less than the office that has fallen upon [them]. . . . No man is self-made, because the fact that anybody who is willing to listen to you comes to you only as a gift, you see, of the historical process by which you happen to have something the other man needs, or the other man is asking for. The fact that he can speak to you is already something, you see, that is not of your own making. . . .
It is, however, true, gentlemen, that through ceremony . . . and title, and emblems, and symbols, and uniforms, and costumes, we are entering the halls of the past, as in great architecture. Architecture, you see, reflects, of course, this tremendous hall of antiquity out of which we come, and out of which we receive our meaning, our name, our status, our profession, our calling; everything we have: our property. . . .
Honor is reciprocal, gentlemen; love is reciprocal; work is reciprocal; and war is reciprocal. Life is not given you—to us—to individuals. If you analyze these four situations, . . . you will find the miracle of our existence is that it is each time a social birth. Society, the group, gives birth to us in our honor, in our love, in our work, and . . . in our struggles. (Eugen Rosenstock–Huessy, Cross of Reality, 1953)
Foundation
To live means to say, “Good–bye,” and to found on this good–bye a new beginning.
You are all too sentimental, and you hang back and you think that you at one time were wonderful. You should only have seen you when you were nine. Terrible brats. I hope you are nicer now. (Eugen Rosenstock–Huessy, Cross of Reality, 1953)
The soul is my captain
Nobody is captain of his soul, gentlemen, or he has no soul. Soul is your part in God. And how can you be the captain of your soul, the one thing with which you are not yourself, but better than yourself? It’s a fantastic notion. . . .
You can be a captain of a ship. You can be captain of a thing, you see, which you direct by your mind. But if the soul is anything, it is your captain. If . . . man has a soul, then certainly nothing else is your captain, but your soul. So if the sentence then makes any sense, it would have to read, “The soul is my captain.” That makes sense. But to say, “I am the captain of my soul” means the execution of this soul. It means exactly that . . . it can’t grow. It means exactly that I—I, with my will, my purpose, my aim, my plan, my master plan, my science— that I plan my soul. . . .
That’s what we have today. It is a fantastic sentence. When you begin to think of this, you don’t wonder why people are today all crazy, and lunatics. “I am the captain of my soul” condemns a man not only to . . . loneliness and isolation, but it condemns him even to supervise his only growing point, his soul, from the point of his . . . mind. . . . Mr. Freud tells [you] how to treat your soul. . . instead of allowing your soul to tell you off. Who is master in the house? The devil of your mind or the soul?
Now, gentlemen, you have to decide this . . . So what about it? My mind can never contain me. I’m more than my mind. Tomorrow I’ll have a different mind; I’ll have a change of mind. Gentlemen, the decision is whether the mind, which is fixed, shall govern growth, or whether it shall not. (Eugen Rosenstock–Huessy, Circulation of Thought, 1949)
Joy at the end of the tether
The Lord enjoins every one of us, in all the actions of life, to have respect to our own calling. He knows the boiling restlessness of the human mind, the fickleness with which it is borne hither and thither, its eagerness to hold opposites at one time in its grasp, its ambition. Therefore, lest all things should be thrown into confusion by our folly and rashness, he has assigned distinct duties to each in the different modes of life. And that no one may presume to overstep his proper limits, he has distinguished the different modes of life by the name of callings. Every man’s mode of life, therefore, is a kind of station assigned him by the Lord, that he may not be always driven about at random. So necessary is this distinction, that all our actions are thereby estimated in his sight, and often in a very different way from that in which human reason or philosophy would estimate them. There is no more illustrious deed even among philosophers than to free one’s country from tyranny, and yet the private individual who stabs the tyrant is openly condemned by the voice of the heavenly Judge. But I am unwilling to dwell on particular examples; it is enough to know that in every thing the call of the Lord is the foundation and beginning of right action. He who does not act with reference to it will never, in the discharge of duty, keep the right path. He will sometimes be able, perhaps, to give the semblance of something laudable, but whatever it may be in the sight of man, it will be rejected before the throne of God; and besides, there will be no harmony in the different parts of his life. Hence, he only who directs his life to this end will have it properly framed; because free from the impulse of rashness, he will not attempt more than his calling justifies, knowing that it is unlawful to overleap the prescribed bounds. He who is obscure will not decline to cultivate a private life, that he may not desert the post at which God has placed him. Again, in all our cares, toils, annoyances, and other burdens, it will be no small alleviation to know that all these are under the superintendence of God. The magistrate will more willingly perform his office, and the father of a family confine himself to his proper sphere. Every one in his particular mode of life will, without repining, suffer its inconveniences, cares, uneasiness, and anxiety, persuaded that God has laid on the burden. This, too, will afford admirable consolation, that in following your proper calling, no work will be so mean and sordid as not to have a splendor and value in the eye of God. (Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, III.10.6)
HT: Rich Lusk
Allegiance
Paul views the by-pistis path (the allegiance path) as fundamentally different than the by-works-of-law path, even though both avenues equally demand good works for final salvation. One path succeeds through Holy Spirit-infused union with Jesus the Messiah; the other fails. Good deeds are required for salvation even though (apart from allegiance to Jesus the king) they are not on their own in the least bit meritorious. Nor can the good deeds necessary for salvation be enumerated or definitively prescribed as part of a salvation system without running afoul of Paul’s teaching here. Pistis alone counts—loyalty to Jesus that is pragmatically expressed in obedient and willing service to him as the king. (Matthew Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone, 121-122)
I gotta have my orange juice. 
Light
with 2 comments
Speaking of how the effects of the gospel can dissipate, René Girard writes:
Written by Scott Moonen
May 27, 2017 at 2:56 pm
Posted in Books, Commentary, Quotations