Assorted Prose (35 page)
Authors: John Updike
What Barth here describes is, of course, his own evangelical stance. In recent years he has rarely preached to any congregation except those of the prison of Basel. His sermons (collected as
Deliverance to the Captives
) repeatedly assure the inmates that he, “a professor of theology and as such presumably a convinced Christian if not a half-saint,” is in fact as great a sinner and as much of a captive as they. In 1946, when the University of Bonn was half in ruins, Barth returned from Switzerland to Germany to deliver the series of lectures eventually published as
Dogmatics in Outline
.
‡
Midway through this uncompromisingly supernaturalist exposition of the Apostles’ Creed, he interrupted himself: “At this point I should like, in passing, to answer a question which has been put to me several times during these weeks: ‘Are you not aware that many
are sitting in this class who are not Christians?’ I have always laughed and said, ‘That makes no difference to me.’ ”
Having defined and restricted the meaning of
probatio
, Barth examines Anselm’s proof step by step.
Aliquid quo maius cogitari nequit
(“something beyond which it is impossible to conceive anything greater”) is given as a name of God. Barth admires the designation as one purely negative, “designed to exclude just this conceivability of the non-existence or imperfection of God which lurks in the background of every ontic conception of God.” That, so designated, God can exist as an idea in the mind of even non-believers is at some length established. With Barth’s copious commentary solicitously ushering Anselm’s terse Latin every inch of the way, the two theologians proceed side by side, and a certain suspense builds up as the reader anticipates the gigantic leap that lies ahead, from existence as a concept to existence as a fact—from
esse in intellectu
to
esse in re
. Then a strange thing happens. Anselm takes the leap, and Barth does not, yet he goes on talking as if he had never left Anselm’s side. The medieval philosopher, having satisfied himself that to exist
in solo intellectu
is a limitation incompatible with the total superiority of God as conceived, writes:
Existit ergo procul dubio aliquid quo maius cogitari non valet, et in intellectu et in re
.
Literally translated: “There exists, therefore, without doubt, ‘something beyond which it is impossible to conceive anything greater,’ both in knowledge and objectively (in thing).” The three tiny words “
et in re
” carry an immense freight; indeed, it would be difficult to conceive of any words carrying more. For on their backs God rides from the realm of ideas into the realm of objective existence.
Barth glosses this crucial sentence as “Thus as God he cannot exist in knowledge as the one who merely exists in knowledge.” Now, this is a typical Barthian remark, of a piece with “one cannot speak of God simply by speaking of man in a loud voice.” It is also a fairly unexceptionable assertion, except perhaps to Unitarians, pragmatists, and lunatics. That is, we cannot pray to or believe in a God whom we recognize as a figment of our own imaginations. But can this be all Anselm meant?
Barth firmly says so: “All that is proved is just this negative. The positive statement about the genuine and extramental existence of God (in the general sense of the concept ‘existence’) does not stem from the proof and is in no sense derived from it but is proved by the proof only in so far as the opposite statement about God’s merely intramental existence is shown to be absurd. Where then does this positive statement come from? … The positive statement cannot be traced back as it originates in revelation.” To Barth, then, faith and faith alone, faith in the Christian revelation, has supplied the “
et in re
.” Anselm’s proof is merely the scouring of a cup that is then filled from above.
Barth devotes the remainder of the book to arguing that his conception of Anselm’s proof and Anselm’s own conception are identical. Gaunilo is taken to task because “quite obstinately and in actual fact very shortsightedly all he demanded was proof that God exists in the manner of created things.” Such, we must weakly confess, is the proof that we had hoped for. And such—it is our obstinate impression—was the kind of proof that Anselm thought he had supplied. Barth’s enthusiastic recommendation of Anselm’s proof differs only in emphasis from the traditional criticisms: “The fact that God is infinite does not prove that he exists. Rather the fact that God is infinite proves that (if he exists) he exists differently from beings who are not infinite.” But, granted that Anselm built from faith and granted that he conceived of God’s existence as extending into dimensions beyond those of creaturely existence, surely he also believed that he had rendered forever unnecessary the parenthetic “if he exists” so conspicuous in Barth’s paraphrase. The section of the
Proslogion
containing the
probatio
concludes with a prayer thanking God that now
“si te esse nolim credere, non possim non intelligere”
(“even if I did not wish to believe Thine existence, I could not but know it”).
Whereas Barth admits that “By the miracle of foolishness it is possible to think of God as not existing. But only by this miracle. Anselm had certainly not reckoned with this.” There is, then, a difference between the modern and the medieval theologian—the theologian of crisis and the theologian without a sense of crisis. They are separated by nine centuries in which the miracle of disbelief has so often recurred that to call it a miracle seems an irony. The gap between
credere
and
intelligere
across which Anselm slung his syllogism has grown so broad that only Jahweh’s unappealable imperatives can span it: “God,” Barth says, “shatters every syllogism.” Several times Barth speaks of Anselm’s formula
quo maius cogitari nequit
as an “embargo,” as a Divine prohibition in the style of the First Commandment: “God is the One who manifests himself in the command not to imagine a greater than he.” This “embargo” is in fact on freedom of thought, “the most inward and most intimate area of freedom.
Bene intelligere
means: to know once and for all, as a real ox knows its master or a true ass its master’s stall.” Here Barth’s vocabulary and theology seem more Biblical than the Bible itself. The Christian believer, awaking from the medieval dream wherein Church and State, faith and science, thoughts and things seemed to merge, has been restored with a vengeance to his primitive desperation.
The understanding that faith seeks is, for Barth, fundamentally an understanding of what man and religion are
not
. Anselm’s proof—“a model piece of good, penetrating, and neat theology”—interests him in its rigorous negativity, its perfect independence of natural phenomena, and the “key” it holds for him is, possibly, that it proves nothing—probes, that is, the nothingness from which rises the cry for God. In “The Task of the Ministry,” Barth preached:
We cannot speak of God. The mystics, and we all in so far as we are mystics, have been wont to
assert
that what annihilates and enters into man, the Abyss into which he falls, the Darkness to which he surrenders himself, the No before which he stands is
God
; but this we are incapable of
proving
. The only part of our assertion of which we are
certain
, the only part we can
prove
, is that man is negatived, negated.
*
Most of the quotations not specifically assigned are from the collection of addresses titled
The Word of God and the Word of Man
, available as a Harper Torchbook and quite the best introduction to Barth’s work. A brief life and full bibliography is provided by Georges Casalis in
Portrait of Karl Barth
(tr. Robert McAfee Brown. Doubleday, 1963).
†
See
Christ and Adam
(Harper; 1957).
‡
Barth was an early and vigorous enemy of Nazism—“pure unreason, the product of madness and crime.” Teaching theology at Bonn in 1933, Barth (with Martin Niemöller and others) transformed the Evangelical Church in Germany into the “Confessing Church”—confessing, that is, the Barmen Confession, which Barth wrote and which begins with a condemnation of the Hitler-supported “German Christians.” In 1935 the Gestapo expelled Barth from Germany; he returned to his native city of Basel, on the German border, where he could oversee and with volumes of exhortation encourage the spiritual struggle against Nazism. In his foreword to
Dogmatics in Outline
, Barth describes his 1946 audience: “The audience consisted partly of theologians, but the larger part was of students from the other faculties. Most people in the Germany of to-day have in their own way and in their own place endured and survived much, almost beyond all measure. I noted the same in my Bonn lads. With their grave faces, which had still to learn how to smile again, they no less impressed me than I them, I who was an alien, the center of all sorts of gossip from old times. For me the situation will remain unforgettable. By a mere coincidence it was my fiftieth semester. And when it was past, my impression was that for me it was the best ever.”
TILLICH
M
ORALITY AND
B
EYOND
, by Paul Tillich. 95 pp. Harper & Row, 1963.
This slim but dense entry in the Religious Perspective series consists of three lectures delivered by Professor Tillich at Dartmouth and two chapters lifted from an earlier book. Morality is defined as obedience to an unconditional imperative—“the demand to become actually what one is essentially and therefore potentially.” Our “essential nature” is equated with our “created nature,” though Divine Creation seems to be understood as little more than a metaphor. The myth of the Fall, by which traditional Christianity explained Man’s estrangement from his created nature, Tillich rather individually reads to mean that Adam had lost innocence
before
the temptation of Jehovah’s prohibition, and already stood on a boundary of “desire” between guilt and innocence. Moral law, though valuable as cumulative wisdom and as an inculcator of moral habit, is inferior to love, “the urge for participation in the other one,” which is “the ultimate principle of moral demands.” Only love, particularly in the form of self-transcending
agape
, “can transform itself according to the concrete demands of every individual and social situation without losing its eternity and dignity.” Tillich carries forward this somewhat diagrammatic exposition with admirable intelligence. The last two chapters, which discuss ethical systems in the context of history, are especially brilliant. Yet the net effect is one of ambiguity, even futility—as if the theologian were trying to revivify the Christian corpse with transfusions of Greek humanism, German metaphysics, and psychoanalytical theory. Terms like “grace” and “Will of God” walk through these pages as bloodless ghosts, transparent against the milky background of “beyond” and “being” that Tillich, God forbid, would confuse with the Christian faith.
MORE LOVE IN THE WESTERN WORLD
L
OVE
D
ECLARED:
Essays on the Myths of Love
, by Denis de Rougemont, translated from the French by Richard Howard. 235 pp. Pantheon, 1963.
Denis de Rougemont, the Swiss theologian and essayist who is presently director of the Centre Européen de la Culture, in Geneva, is best known in this country as the author of
Love in the Western World
, which was first published in France in 1939 and, considerably revised and augmented, again in 1954; a translation of the revised edition was published by Pantheon in 1956. The self-announced purpose of this famous book is “to describe the inescapable conflict in the West between passion and marriage.” It begins with a detailed examination of the legend of Tristan and Iseult, and in the inconsistencies of the narrative discovers a furtive conflict between two religions: an exoteric creed of feudal honor and fealty, and an esoteric creed of unlimited passion. Tristan and Iseult are, de Rougemont concludes, in love not with one another but with love itself, with their own
being
in love; “their unhappiness thus originates in a false reciprocity, which disguises a twin narcissism.” Hence their passion secretly wills its own frustrations and irresistibly seeks the bodily death that forever removes it from the qualifications of life, the disappointments and diminishments of actual possession. “Passionate love, the longing for what sears us and annihilates us in its triumph—there is the secret which Europe has never allowed to be given away; a secret it has always repressed—and preserved!”
