”Then, one day, a miracle happens and the spirits of the two languages mate.  This does not strike like a bolt out of the blue.  The time for such a hieros gamos, for such a Holy Wedding, is not ripe until a receptive people reaches out toward the wing-beat of an alien masterpiece with its own yearning and its own utterance, and when its receptiveness is not longer based on curiosity, interest, desire for education, or even aesthetic pleasure, but has become an integral part of the people’s historical development. . . .”

[Franz Rosenzweig, His Life and Thought, 3rd ed., presented by Nahum N. Glatzer (Indianapolis:  Hackett, 1998), 257, 259.]  Emphasis mine.

I do still need to compare the passage with the original German, when I find a copy.  I wonder, did you think “oriole” when you saw the word aureole as I did?  Yes, they are related (aureolus=golden).  The passage above suggests far more than words, including Rosenzweig’s reverence for the Jewish Scriptures, what he called the “Only Testament.”  When I reflect on his conviction the Scriptures used words-beyond-words to reveal the proper relationship between God, Man, and World, I find his passage and its translation into English to have been inspired.

Words are tombstones.

Words are bridges over chasms. One usually walks across without looking down. If one looks down he is liable to feel giddy.

Words are also boards laid over a shaft, concealing it.

To be a philosopher is to open tombs, look into abysses, climb down shafts.

Word-speaking, word-pictures — such as we find in his Star of Redemption later.

[from Nahum N. Glatzer (presenter), Franz Rosenzweig, His Life and Thought, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998]

Astonishing cynicism, or a way to insight?  Bear in mind Buttrick wrote right after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a world war had darkened things already for many years (consider the Asian and African experiences, not just the period between 7DEC41 and VJ Day).  And he focused his discussion on the dilemma of our ignorance, our inability to generate Light for life.

Of the demagoguery he mentions there are examples held fast in memory, the “Kingfish” Huey Long of Louisiana who was murdered at the capitol in Baton Rouge in 1935.  Without forgetting his populist devotion to Louisianans, I associate Long’s remarkable saga with Sinclair Lewis’ fascistic Berzilius “Buzz” Windrip in It Can’t Happen Here (1935).  “Berzilius” rings as “Beelzebub” in my ears; but, well, it was a satire, though with plenty of American referents.  Others have suggested other loose parallels — among the worst Hitler comes to mind.

It is not that people are “bad” or that they choose demagogues – and what American politicians can rise to the top unless they can “draw the people together” unto themselves to some degree?  No, “bad” doesn’t get it.  Says Buttrick, our known burden of ignorance pales before the “worse burden and deeper need” – that we are wicked.  We know that, too, and mostly deny it.  Though in admitting it we cannot help ourselves, we need a deliverer.  A demagogue?  No, but someone who can also take our mortality to task and assure us of Life.  So, Buttrick ended his chapter on these themes this way:

• Man is constitutionally ignorant, endemically wicked, irrevocably mortal; but he knows it, and is therefore above his ignorance, sin, and mortality; yet he is not delivered from his lower life by his own power, but remains helpless without the Great Companion.
• There is no book logic to uphold, or refute, these contentions.  There is only the logic of life: the reader must ask himself if this description of the paradox of human nature is true or untrue of his human nature.
• If he finds any truth in the description, he may be willing to ask further if the new-old words of the creed have an answering truth:  “God of God, Light of Light, Very God of very God; . . . who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, . . . and was made man.”  (from the Nicene Creed)

. . . a number of them would prefer, it seems, merely to be a channel for the stream of research, a vanishing instant in its ever changing self-awareness. Their misfortune is not to have seen that thought is not the harlot of time . . .

(The Peasant of the Garonne, 1968, page 102)

– on troubling changes in the culture of literacy:

The “most troubling crisis is the sea change in the culture of literacy itself, the degree to which our overwhelmingly fast and visually furious culture renders serious reading increasingly irrelevant, hollowing out the habits of attention indispensable for absorbing long-form narrative and the following of sustained argument.”

And literate folk generally will agree with Wasserman that the culture of literacy is crucial to the citizens’ exercise of cogent and coherent civic and political life and the health of society.

Another comment by contrast, from Forty Acres and A Goat, by Will D. Campbell, about himself: (p. 3)

“At first the consolidated country high school seemed big to him. He once counted the books in the library and there were almost two hundred. He wondered how it would be to know everything in all those books. Then one day one of the teachers drew a big circle on the blackboard. She made a tiny dot in the circle. She told them the circle was the world and that if they knew everything in every book in every library in the world, the little dot was how much they would know. He questioned how important books were after that.”

His questioning did not keep him from writing books.

His writing books did not sunder his modesty and humility about the limitations of books and learning — the kinds of limitations that divide people rather than bring them together. Many “Bible-believing Baptists” have shared with other folk the conviction that that Bible was enough. It is interesting, though, how the Bible has prompted so much writing of books.

There is a point worth exploring, one relevant to Wasserman’s concerns, and one he acknowledged in his article. It is that the “print” media have great power. But limited power. Most people do not read books. Or newspapers — certainly not as in times past. “Reading” on the Internet has grown, but it is not the same “literacy” of concern. And all print media influences touch people indirectly and at a distance, though no less certainly.

What is in contention is whether those influences are what we want and need. The quick conclusion? Usage, markets, and the influence of the “democraweb” will provide such diversity of opinion that we may, “have the world” and at yet have little of clear value.

In a new twist on old news, this time from the UK (The Times [London], January 14; and poorly covered or characterized in the American mass media) Tara Brabazon, a British professor (U. of Brighton), weighed in on the dangers of relying too much on Web resources such as Google (”White bread for the mind;” “Google is filling, but it does not necessarily offer nutritional content.”) and Wikipedia. What most media commentators missed was her assertion that students must be taught to distinguish between reliable and less reliable sources on the Internet. Students should learn to work with the library, and books, and the Web, and to be able to discern between sources and make reliable interpretations of them. And that takes me back to the point of value: yes, there are many non-negotiable cultural foundations that should be familiar to students — the stuff of an adequate liberal arts curriculum, for example. Yet the culture always evolves, and much that is new gets attention. What persists because of its value does so because enough people make it part of their lives or recognize it as relevant to start with.

Consider this: the World Wide Web is a triumph of ephemerae. And trivia – collected, or deposited, as by travellers exchanging information and opinion at a rest stop or roadway inn. Most of what you find there won’t last. Interestingly though, for now, the Web provides (increasingly by the day, and from reliable sources) unparalleled access to much that has long been of enduring value in world cultural traditions. It is a tool, or set of tools, to be approached and used wisely, as one would approach a library, whether of 200 volumes like the one in Will Campbell’s high school, or any other.

“This is politics, much as I hate that word. We had an old governor in Mississippi who always said, ‘people don’t come to political rallies to think. They come to holler.’ And he kept getting elected.”