“Poor mortal, I am stung with a constant sense of time. But I can cover time-spans from one day to a year to a generation to a century, with my intent and my understanding. And am I asked to believe that neither my creator nor the man who revealed him to us enters upon the measures of time which I alone can understand? I know they do. For I have lived through epoch-making events which have changed the lives of all men on this globe. And in the light of the Lord of the Eons, I have found my path through these ends of my world and the beginnings of the next eon. To tell me, “oh, the Christian era has been a helpful myth in the past, but now we don’t need it any longer,” is like telling me: “the raft on which you passed [over] the abyss must be condemned.” I have found that there is a way of living through the end and the beginning of an era in perfect freedom, neither as the slave of capitalism nor as the slave of communism, neither as merely a German nor merely as an American, neither as a soldier nor as a scholar. And I should now go and destroy the raft, my raft, simply because people who have never passed over an abyss say: “There is no abyss: therefore the Lord of continuity through all the abysses between eras can be put up at our rummage sale of old wear.””
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, who lived through two world wars and the life-shattering events that interluded, from the introduction to The Fruit of Lips, against the modernist theologians who tried to reduce the gospels to a disordered biography of an interesting personality from the ancient world.
Beyond the challenging and profound ideas that pour off his pages, ER-H is an arresting and shocking writer. Here he refutes the modernists not by demolishing their scholarship (he does do that elsewhere) but by appealing to his own experience passing through the destruction of the world in the 20th Century “in perfect freedom”. Against this, the “people who have never passed over an abyss” have nothing to say.
Rosenstock-Huessy wrote theology the way it ought to be written: forceful, fearless, wild-eyed, passionate. This is how you write for the queen of the sciences.