Naive Sophistication

Naive Sophistication January 17, 2014

Rosenstock (Judaism Despite Christianity: The 1916 Wartime Correspondence Between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig, 127-8) objects to Rosenzweig’s characterization of church history as a move from the church of the spirit to the church of dogma and tradition. Rosenstock thinks the dualism nonsense: “Every Christian experiences the dogmas of the church as martuus, as his personal experience. Redemption means precisely that one can appropriate a proposition of Nicaea and Constantinople, such as the qui locutus est per prophetas as a personal experience an as the highest valid actual truth. The nearer you reach to the historical incarnation of God, the fewer the institutional irrelevancies with which the rebirth of the Gospel came among all men whom it reached.”

The propositions of Christian dogmas are, in short, “equally naive and sophisticated.” John is not simply, as Rosenzweig has it, a “naive spiritual writer,” but simultaneously “the greatest apologist and the first.” And the church always embodied both sides: “So you have both parties, Mystics and Protestants; within the Church both the Franciscan and the Dominican are possibly, which is to say that differences of emphasis between naive and sophisticated are not unchristian or heretical. Only to divorce them from one another leads to apostasy and death. So the combination of naive and sophisticated must remain within each individual man; just as every hale and heathy man has two legs, in the same way he must know how to be humble and how to be bold.”


Browse Our Archives