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”
The Son restores thenThe proper order betweenWords spoken and lives lived.Words should be orders given,Promises made.Lives should be orders carried outAnd promises fulfilled.This, we saw, had beenThe essential aimOf all speech and ritual,Since man spoke.
The purely indicative usageOf our textbooks and ‘thinkers’Is a mere grave-diggingOr afterthoughtAfter the events made possibleBy speech.
Jesus showed thatAll words spoken before himHad challenged him,Ordered him into existence,In so far as they wereReal prayer,Real longing,
Real prophecy,Fruitful imagination.And so he fulfilled them all.He revealed what we doWhen we speak:By speaking,As it requires listening,We believe inSeed and harvest,Promise and fulfillment,Command and report.We believe thatIn the beginningWas the Word,And in the endThere 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.
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 onceFor what have done and are doing,Declare solemnly:We, now, together with our Head,Step on the side of the silent victimsAnd offer ourselves to our MakerSo that he can remake the sacrificeAs he pleases.
How else could ever a new inspirationBefall us as a peopleUnless we offer ourselvesAs the body for this inspiration?
Time and again, man has to be ripped openBy the ploughshare of sufferingAnd open himselfLike a dry and desiccated earthTo dew and rain.And ever since one man did thisManifestly all alone by himself,His congregations relieve the membersOf the total pressure of absolute loneliness.
In every generation, the groupWhich may be remodeled,May increase, until the whole of mankindWill be allowed to fall silentAnd to cleanse themselvesFrom the chatter and clatter of the day,And listen to the spirit,Simultaneously.
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