Respondeo Etsi Mutabor

"I respond although I will be changed." This was the motto of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, a German-Jewish-turned-Christian intellectual who emigrated to America when Adolf started hooking up the utilities. Rosenstock-Huessy, one of those sloppy second-rate thinkers in whose works one intermittently finds ravishingly interesting ideas, focused most of his energies on language-or rather speech. Speech and Reality, one of his works, gives away the scheme by nearly intoning that speech=reality. I know this makes your Wittgensteinercounter click at a very high rate, but Eugen didn't find Wittgensteinian language-games very entertaining. He was rather more interested in transmuting a somewhat traditionally Christian universe into the modern age by understanding the reality of both in terms of speech-and he was doing this before Austin and Searle.

While Rosenstock-Huessy's "Jesus-as-nearly-superhuman-human" theology is less than inspiring, I find in his motto the living pulse of any vital conservatism, especially any repristinary (if I may engage in the manufacture of neologisms) variety. I would contrast repristinary conservatism with tradition-sensitive progressivism; in the Reformed camp, John Murray was an example of repristination, while Abraham Kuyper indulged in progressivism.

Reinvigoration of an existing tradition requires response to detractors, and it dutifully accepts the inevitable transformation involved in response, but true conservatism, repristinary conservatism, is marked by the wistfulness implicit in the motto. "Would that I should not be changed, but respond I must; therefore changed I shall be." This, it occurs to me, is the way that reformata semper reformandum is supposed to play out: not with the gleefulness of reckless innovation, but with the care occasioned by affection.