Fruit of Lips

March 16, 2018

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s Fruit of Lips is biblical theology done in the mode of T.S. Eliot. The Four Quartets is the only thing like it that I have read.

The title comes from the promise in Isaiah 57.19, “I create the fruit of lips,” and its fulfillment in ecclesial life in Hebrews 13.15, “Through Jesus, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise, the fruit of lips that openly profess his name.”

The book is a strange project that argues with refreshingly philosophical and devotional vigor, out of linguistics and theology and history, for the necessity of there being four gospels. When earlier the problem had been posed to me as, “Why do we have four gospels if they seem to repeat themselves and contradict?” the answer had been “They don’t contradict; they actually give us a richer portrait of the Jesus of History who, by virtue of his divine identity and resurrection, is also the Christ of faith.”

But Rosenstock-Huessy insists that the point of the four gospels is not “more data” (86). Rather, he invents more than a dozen rich arguments that demonstrate the necessity of four confessions of the life of Jesus, the figure who liberates the world from its fourfold bondage into a life of truly fruitful speech and action in a distinctly Christian era, anno domini. To repeat his dense and wide-ranging arguments would be to repeat the book.

I can only recommend it, provide you with a link for purchasing it, and commentary on two of his poems.

“There shall be incarnation”

Jesus Christ atones not only for the threefold rift between God and man, man and his neighbor, and man and creation, but even for the rift between words and lives.

The Son restores then

The proper order between

Words spoken and lives lived.

Words should be orders given,

Promises made.

Lives should be orders carried out

And promises fulfilled.

This, we saw, had been

The essential aim

Of all speech and ritual,

Since man spoke.

Scholarly and scientific language has since pierced through ritual which, despite the ways in which tribal ritual has never been able to create a Christianly catholic communion, at least maintained the connection between words and action. The result of this sundering is the textbook and the concession of privilege place to the indicative mood.

The purely indicative usage

Of our textbooks and ‘thinkers’

Is a mere grave-digging

Or afterthought

After the events made possible

By speech.

There has, however, always been an alternative to the indicative mood, as well as to any kind of pre-Christian (B.C.) language. Real language that could bear real fruit was the prophetic, volative, or expressive language that stepped out from the stream of the epoch, or civilization, and said something that anticipated Jesus. Our words then, without, of course, being the primary cause of the incarnation, take their place within the cluster of causes. Prayer, longing, and prophecy, especially in the tradition of Israel, called forth Jesus to fulfill all prayer, longing, and promise in a way that would subvert the work of the world-spirit in its four forms and set up a truly fruitful new beginning in history.

Matthew, the Jewish sinner, subverts tribe and ritual by beginning his gospel with a genealogy and ending it by rendering the genealogy insignificant. Mark subverted cosmology and temple-worship by writing about the cosmic power who defeated all cosmic powers by choosing to serve. Luke painted a portrait of a genius who bowed his own genius-spirit to the Holy Spirit, choosing to obey. John subverted poetry and art by introducing us to the Eternal Being who would heretofore refuse to be anything other than particular. Shown its own barrenness, human history can now enter the Christian era, hear the linguistically supreme word of Christ, and finally bear fruits which merit being “gathered into the barns of eternity.”

Jesus showed that

All words spoken before him

Had challenged him,

Ordered him into existence,

In so far as they were

Real prayer,

Real longing,
Real prophecy,

Fruitful imagination.

And so he fulfilled them all.

He revealed what we do

When we speak:

By speaking,

As it requires listening,

We believe in

Seed and harvest,

Promise and fulfillment,

Command and report.

We believe that

In the beginning

Was the Word,

And in the end

There shall be incarnation.

The existence of four canonical gospels, then, is precisely important, rather than the ambiguous “it’s good to have more than one.” The four gospels introduce us in all four ways to the One who showed the barrenness of each of the four modes of worldly organization. In his life he proved his mastery of speech “by his creative inventiveness of new ritual, his poetical genius of the parable, his effort-less superiority to obsessions and demons, his prophetic insight into the future of the world’s history… With all these four rivers of speech filled to the brim, he emptied himself of all of them.” (117) He roamed a particular patch of earth announcing that the kingdom of heaven had come, called men to invest the things of heaven, and warned (and encouraged) them that they would be known by their fruits, himself being the firstfruits.

Personally, this makes more sense for me of Jesus’ eschatological preaching. With him, there is true seed for the world; God may begin the harvest at any point in history. Our liturgies of offering that sit between the liturgy of the word (reading, preaching, creed, prayers) and the liturgy of the Eucharist (offering, blessing, breaking, giving, sending out), which consist of offerings of money, art, and our very selves, make sense here. In faith, we invest ourselves and our tools, because “you will only be known by your fruits.”

“The whole expression of ‘a Body of Christ’”

Jesus also leaves his Church behind, and Rosenstock-Huessy does have a few words to say toward an ecclesiology in several places. The richest section is another of his poems. In the context of his book, this poem comes at the end of a reflection on Matthew’s subversion of ritual. Ritual, throughout human culture, has insisted that sacrifices be made and silence be observed by those “outside,” only the right words being said in the right way by the right people. Jesus has the “bad manners” of a roast beef who begins to talk in the middle of a fraternity dinner.

The whole expression of a Body of Christ,

With the head in heaven,

Meant exactly this,

That we who would crucify the Lord every day,

In our rage and envy and indifference,

Now, with our eyes opened once

For what have done and are doing,

Declare solemnly:

We, now, together with our Head,

Step on the side of the silent victims

And offer ourselves to our Maker

So that he can remake the sacrifice

As he pleases.

This poem does not exhaust Rosenstock-Huessy’s ecclesiology: as it begins, all it does is tell us how a “body of Christ” would express itself. Muting the stop, for a moment, of Christian as recipient of the body and blood of Christ, or at least moving past it into the meaning of the post-communion Christian vocation, he points out that we must identify with the victim of our feast together, or we will never be able to be truly catholic–the body of Christ broken for the life of the world.

How else could ever a new inspiration

Befall us as a people

Unless we offer ourselves

As the body for this inspiration?

Note here, the pairing of body and spirit. Our bodies–and, Christian theology would add, our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength–are to be inspired, or filled with and led by the Holy Spirit.

Time and again, man has to be ripped open

By the ploughshare of suffering

And open himself

Like a dry and desiccated earth

To dew and rain.

And ever since one man did this

Manifestly all alone by himself,

His congregations relieve the members

Of the total pressure of absolute loneliness.

He ends with a striking note of catholicity and hypothetical universalism that is suggested by the analogy of seeds bearing fruit for the harvest. As one plants and another waters, God gives the growth, and all our labor is carried forward in hope, not knowing the extend of God’s renewal and salvation.

In every generation, the group

Which may be remodeled,

May increase, until the whole of mankind

Will be allowed to fall silent

And to cleanse themselves

From the chatter and clatter of the day,

And listen to the spirit,

Simultaneously.

Jack Franicevich

Jack is a Biola University graduate (business) and an MDiv student at Denver Seminary. His particular interests are the articulation of Christian truth and the public witness of the Church in everyday life, especially Christian friendship. To those ends he preaches, writes hymns, and is passionately interested in whatever anyone else tells him they’re interested in.

Fruit of Lips

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