This essay is dedicated to Professor Fannie J. LeMoine.
In 1931 Karl Barth published Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum, Anselm’s Proof of the Existence of God in the Context of His Theological Scheme.1 In a short, difficult book Barth surveys Anselm’s work as a whole, with the focus on three sections of the Proslogion, (Proslogion 2–4) in which Anselm argues for the existence of God.2 Barth interprets Anselm’s argument not as a philosophical proof but rather as an exercise of fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. Anselm’s argument is a theological argument by which faith, reflecting on its proper object, exhibits the necessary existence of God. The argument is a form of prayer. Anselm prays to the One whose existence he seeks to demonstrate.3 The intellectus fidei [i.e., the knowledge with which Anselm is concerned] “can consist only of positive meditations on the object of faith. It cannot establish this object of faith as such but rather has to understand it in its very incomprehensibility.”4 Everything depends on grace but also “on the fact that God himself comes within his system as the object of his thinking.”5
Barth considered the Anselm commentary a critical turning point in his development.6 Scholars like Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Eberhard Jüngel, and Thomas Torrance agreed. Like Barth, they understood the Anselm commentary as the key to his monumental Church Dogmatics.7 According to that generation of scholars, Barth experienced two revolutions in his thinking. The first was the transition from Protestant liberalism to dialectical theology, but the second was a “complete reorientation” (in the words of Jüngel) to dogmatic theology.8 However, the Anselm commentary has never received the attention it merits, and since the 1970s, particularly in the United States, scholars have essentially disregarded it.
I want to argue that with the Anselm commentary Barth adopts the theological realism of St. Augustine and St. Anselm. Anselm’s fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding) opens, for Barth, the possibility of knowledge by analogy, which in the Church Dogmatics Barth calls the analogia fidei (the analogy of faith). The analogia fidei is not new to Anselm or to Barth. Rather it is a version of St. Augustine’s doctrine of illumination.9 The Anselm commentary therefore is authentically revolutionary. The dialectical Barth, restricted by NeoKantian limits on reason, was unable to speak dogmatically about the content of revelation. In Anselm Barth discovers Augustinian realism and with it a form of rationality open to the Word of God in its full reality, universality, and objectivity. With this realist orientation, Barth found a position from which, on behalf of the church, he could speak authoritatively as a theologian to the church itself, to the secular order, and even to the state. The Anselm commentary, therefore, is critical not only for his Church Dogmatics. It was Anselm’s realism that informed the Barmen Declaration of 1934, in which the Confessing Church resisted the takeover of the established Protestant Church in Germany by the Nazi state. Barth was the primary author of Barmen, which Eberhard Jüngel has called “the basic text of Barth’s theology.”10
With the analogia fidei Barth acquires a doctrine of analogy, according to which the theologian can make positive dogmatic statements about a God who is wholly other. Barth finds an analogy between the divine and the human, “the likeness of the known in the knowing, the object in thought, the Word of God in the word that is thought and spoken by man” even if this analogy is possible “not as an inborn or acquired property of man but only as the work of the actual grace of God.”11 The analogia fidei is neither a method nor technique, nor is it an ad hoc philosophical position. It is the theological orientation of the mature Barth. It has also been the source of considerable confusion. While Barth adopts the analogia fidei, he rejects the analogia entis, the analogy of being, which for him is a Roman Catholic version of natural theology.12 Barth’s rejection of the analogy of being has led to what is in my view a fundamental misconception: that Barth also rejects ontology, that Barth recognizes no ontological likeness between a wholly transcendent God and the human being.13 But I shall argue that the analogia fidei recognizes its own ontology within revelation—an analogy of being through faith.14 God is not ontologically other: The Word of God is the source of all created being. The Word is itself the truth: universal, objective truth. Therefore, because faith has this truth as its object, an analogy of being through faith is possible and real. In the American academy, the Anselm commentary, when it is not ignored, has been trivialized by two false alternatives: that Barth after Anselm remained a Kantian dialectical theologian or that the Anselm commentary merely anticipated the Yale School of postliberal theology.15 In order to recover Barth’s Anselm commentary it is necessary to survey the development of the scholarship on Barth’s Anselm work.
Bruce McCormack, professor of systematic theology at the Princeton Theological Seminary, argues that Barth’s Anselm commentary represents no change in Barth’s thinking.16 After the Anselm commentary, Barth remained a Kantian dialectical theologian, what McCormack calls “a critical realist,” who “everywhere presupposed … the validity of Kant’s epistemology (where it touched upon knowledge of empirical reality), and … the success of Kant’s critique of metaphysics.”17 Notwithstanding Kant’s critique of metaphysics, Barth was also a Kantian realist, who attempted “to think from a standpoint lying in God Himself … and therefore, from a standpoint lying beyond this world, history, and human possibilities.”18
McCormack and others who find in the mature Barth a Kantian dialectical theologian do not appreciate the depth of the crisis that Kant represented for Barth.19 The dialectical Barth was indeed a Neo-Kantian.20 But as such he could not speak substantively about revelation. In Neo-Kantian terms, revelation is either a concept constituted by thought or the negation of any concepts by divine act. Neither option, nor their dialectical interaction, is theologically adequate. Barth himself diagnosed the problem in some 1929 lectures published as “Fate and Idea in Theology.”21 One moment of the Barthian dialectic is represented by the Thomist realism of the analogy of being. For the Thomist realist theology involves “certain precise conceptual formulations” drawn from experience in history, nature, or our own consciousness.22 Such conceptions, however necessary, cannot refer to a God who is wholly other. Therefore, Barth’s dialectic involves a second moment, which is represented by idealism.23 Idealism responds to naive Thomist realism with a dialectical critique, in its use of “dialectical modes of thought,” to contrast God’s givenness and non-givenness in revelation.24 Thomist realism and idealism are themselves dialectically related although Barth denies the possibility of any synthesis. They involve a contradiction placed into the world by God’s Word.25
Barth’s dialectic opposes the transcendent acts of God to all concepts. God acts in complete freedom. Divine revelation is a free act, a contingent event utterly beyond any thought. Although revelation may occur as event or act, the theologian cannot grasp it in conceptual form or make it part of any systematic thought. From the theologian’s point of view, therefore, revelation is non-objective and wholly conditional. Because of the radical contingency of revelation, the theologian is incapable of making assertions about it. Revelation remains unavailable, and theology as any kind of rational discipline or “science” remains impossible. The best the theologian can do is dialectically to oppose every theological assertion with its antithesis. But even the idealist critique requires a “human conceptual scheme,” and a dialectic of human concepts is no more adequate than naive Thomist realism. In the end, all that the dialectical theologian has are concepts, and “[a] theology ignorant that even its best concept of God, informed by the pinnacle of human thought, is in itself no witness to God can only be, strictly speaking, a witness to the devil.”26
The second problem for McCormack is that the Anselm commentary will not accommodate Kant.27 In the Anselm commentary, Barth enters territory beyond Kant and the dialectical crisis.28 Here he breathes a new air. Anselm’s proof issues in “joy,” with a “characteristic absence of crisis.”29 Theology is no longer contorted in dialectics: “theological science, as a science of the Credo, can have only a positive character.”30 Barth makes expansive claims about the rational structure of divine objectivity; the Word of God is the divine reason, the ratio veritatis, the ratio summae naturae.31 The Word is objective, intelligible truth, reflected in the theologian’s reason (noetic ratio). From this ontology, Barth makes the claim, fundamental for him, that faith is knowledge.32 As Barth put it in a series of lectures he delivered in 1946 in Bonn:
The concept of knowledge, of scientia, is insufficient to describe what Christian knowledge is. We must rather go back to what in the Old Testament is called wisdom, what the Greeks called sophia and the Latins sapientia, in order to grasp the knowledge of theology in its fullness. Sapientia is distinguished from the narrower concept of scientia, wisdom is distinguished from knowing, in that it not only contains knowledge in itself, but also that this concept speaks of a knowledge which is practical knowledge, embracing the entire existence of man.33
The truth of Jesus Christ is not one truth among others, but “the truth, the universal truth that creates all truth as surely as it is the truth of God, the prima veritas which is also the ultima veritas.”34 To know this truth means “to know all things, even man, oneself, the cosmos and the world.”35 Barth’s claims about rationality in the Anselm commentary (ratio summae naturae) are simply contrary to Kant.
The influence of the Yale School on the reception of Barth in the United States cannot be overstated.36 Hans W. Frei, a professor of religious studies at Yale until his untimely death in 1988, was most responsible for the Yale interpretation of Barth.37 Although he wrote a famous Ph.D. dissertation on Barth, Frei was not primarily a Barth scholar, and his work on Barth is fragmentary, some of it only published posthumously. Against the depredations of historical criticism and Biblical literalism, Frei wanted to reclaim the literal sense, the sensus literalis, of the gospel narratives.38 Drawing on contemporary literary theory, philosophy, and cultural anthropology, Frei read the gospel narratives as a self-referential semiotic system that constitutes the church.39 In the language of George Lindbeck, the gospel narratives are “self involving” and “intratextual.”40 Their “meaning” does not involve reference to facts external to the text. Rather the “meaning” is the narrative itself as it shapes the community of faith.41
For his ambitious project, Frei adopted Karl Barth. For Frei, Barth was a theologian of language who anticipated Anglo American and French language theory as well as Frei’s own thinking about the literal sense of Scripture.42 Frei maintained that, for Barth, “[t]heology constitutes an inquiry into the specific language peculiar to, in fact constitutive of, the specific semiotic community called the Christian Church or churches.”43 Barth argued, “we have the reality only under the description, only linguistically, not independently of the concept as we use it in preaching and liturgy, in action in church and world, in prayer and praise.”44 For Frei, Barth viewed any prolegomena to dogmatics as an attempt “to exhibit the rules or fragments of rules implicit in the ruled use of language which is the sign system of the sociolinguistic community called the Church.”45 Frei understands the Barthian analogia fidei as a “technical device” for “Christian self-description.”46 Anselm’s proof establishes “the right conceptual description of God” that “logically implies God’s reality.”47 In using the technical device of analogy, Barth created “a universe of discourse,” instructing the reader “in the use of that language by showing him how—extensively, and not only by stating rules or principles of the discourse.”48 In order to fully comprehend the problem with Frei’s analysis, we now turn to the Anselm commentary itself.
The problem of dialectical theology appears in the Anselm commentary under the theme of anxiety. God can exist in thought (in intellectu), but the existence of God in reality (in re) remains uncertain. For this reason, faith can involve “anxiety.”49 God’s existing in our thought (in intellectu) “is a problematical existing which has first to be examined in respect of its truth.”50 The “enemy” here, according to Barth, is “denial or doubt.”51 God’s presence in intellectu could be a mere “hypothesis, fiction, lie or mistake.”52
Anselm proposes to resolve this anxiety by showing that God, as he is present to faith, “cannot exist in knowledge as the one who merely exists in knowledge.”53 If God exists only in intellectu, faith is an illusion. Because the assertion that “God is not a real object” is possible, “[i]t has to be shown that it is impossible to conceive the object described as God being only a conception.”54 According to Barth, Anselm’s demonstration proves only “this negative:” “Deus non potest esse in solo intellectu [God cannot exist in the intellect alone].”55
Anxiety, therefore, attends our thinking about God. For example, God cannot be “the greatest of all things.”56 To designate God as the greatest of all things is to have what Barth calls an “ontic” conception of God. Such conceptions make positive claims about the nature or existence of the thing conceived.57 To think in such terms one must assume that our conceptions have the capacity to determine what God is, and any such conception is subject to doubt. We can think of the objects determined by our concepts as not existing. But for faith, God cannot be subject to doubt: God’s nonexistence is unthinkable. God exists whether or not he can be conceived. Therefore, all conceptions that purport to determine what God is are misrepresentations. Anselm must find a designation for God without such conceptions.
In the Proslogion, Anselm discovers a name for God that meets the test: “that than which nothing greater can be thought.” This designation is what Barth calls a “noetic” conception, that is, it does not assume that God is determined by our concepts.58 It is not a conventional definition, nor is it an immanent meaning in a semiotic system. Rather, it is a sign that designates its transcendent object: In Barth’s words, this “name” is “a genuine description (significatio), one Name of God, selected from among the various revealed Names of God for this occasion and for this particular purpose.”59 It is not a supposition “but the revelation apart from which there is no theology at all”60:
With quo maius cogitari nequit [that than which nothing greater can be thought] the enemy (denial or doubt) is sought out on his own ground, in thought itself, on which ground this enemy is repeatedly calling in question the knowledge of God on the assumption of an ontic conception of God, and is placed under the sign of the Name of God and is thereby challenged to necessary knowledge of God. Quo maius cogitari nequit is 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—to exclude it with the radicalism and force of the Creator’s owns injunction to the creature—non eritis sicut Deus [you will not be as God]—and likewise to establish knowledge of the truth of the existence and perfection of God.61
The name is a negative formulation, an intellectual and ethical prohibition on the identification of God with conceptions. It “emerges as something completely independent of whether men in actual fact conceive it or can conceive it”:
All that the formula says about this object is, as far as I can see, this one thing, this one negative: nothing greater than it can be imagined; nothing can be imagined that in any respect whatsoever could or would outdo it; as soon as anyone conceives anything which in any respect whatsoever is greater than it, in so far as it can be conceived at all—then he has not yet begun to conceive it or has already ceased.62
Faith is not the result of human activity or projection, and the object of faith, the Word of God, precedes all mental representations, including language.
Barth, like Anselm, rejects the identification of our conceptions of God with God himself. Our ideas, projections of our thinking, cannot determine what God is. God is wholly other.63 But the Word of God is neither arbitrary nor ineffable. The creation itself is structured on divine reason. Therefore the analogy of faith is possible. Analogy is “the likeness of the known in the knowing, the object in thought, of the Word of God in the word that is thought and spoken by man:”64 “The revelation is the revelation of God in his world, the world which is so constituted that God’s Nature can be manifest therein in speculo, per similitudinem, per analogiam [in a mirror, through a likeness, by analogy] (as far as God wills to reveal himself and has in fact revealed himself), even if in fact it is manifest to no one.”65 The analogy of being, the analogia entis, confuses our conceptions of God with God himself.66 However, the world itself is so constituted in its being that God can be available by analogy.
God is present to the mind in faith (in intellectu) but also in reality (in re). Truth for Anselm is rectitude perceptible only to the mind.67 Barth properly places this definition in the context of Anselm’s doctrine that God is truth: Deum veritatem esse credimus [We believe that God is truth].68 God’s existence is of a superior kind. The truth is “the divine Word, consubstantial with the Father,” which constitutes the foundation of rationality and objectivity.69 The Word is the “sole existence which is real and ultimate” and the basis of all other existence.”70 “[E]verything that exists apart from him exists, as it were, coupled to his Existence, and is therefore conceivable as existing only in relation to the conception of his Existence.”71 The divine Word is ultimate reason it itself: the ratio veritatis [the reason of truth] or ratio summae naturae [the reason of highest nature].72 The Word of God is intrinsically rational, the source of all reason, including human rational activity and the rational structure of nature—the created world. It is the condition by which everything exists, “the condition, the basis and indeed the fashioner of all other existence, the simple origin of all objectivity, of all true outward being and therefore of all true inner being.”73 Precisely because God is truth, Anselm’s argument demonstrates that God exists necessarily: a God that exists necessarily is greater than a God that does not exist necessarily. God’s existence, as necessary truth, is the only existence susceptible to Anselm’s argument.
The ontological priority of the Word is the basis of: analogia fidei, because all created beings have their existence through it, “But even the truth of the object’s existence in nature is dependent not upon itself, but upon the divine Word (and so, on the real ratio veritatis strictly understood) through which it is created. This Word in creating it also confers upon it a resemblance to the truth which belongs to itself (as the Word is spoken from God).”74
Because the Word of God is intrinsically rational, faith requires a rational demonstration of its content. Faith is not an irrational movement of the will. Faith demands “the original primacy of knowledge.”75 Anselm proceeds (within faith) by reason alone, sola ratione.76 The knowledge of God sought by Anselm’s argument is implicit in faith. Theology explicates the rational structure of the divine Word present to faith.
The concept of truths of revelation in the sense of Latin propositions given and sealed once and for all with divine authority in both wording and meaning is theologically impossible.77
It is still the case that we are not concerned with the words as such. In a sense we simply turn our back on them. We look to the true revelation of God.78
Anselm, in Proslogion 4, considers the fool of the Psalms, who says in his heart that there is no God. The fool is a mystery. If Anselm’s argument is correct, how can the fool deny God? For Barth the answer lies in the mystery of predestination: the theologian has faith but the fool does not. The dialogue between the theologian and the fool, therefore, takes place across an abyss. Yet Anselm’s dialogue with the fool is made possible by the analogia fidei. The dialogue between Anselm and Gaunilo, a monk of Marmoutier who responds to Anselm on behalf of the fool, is really about the sovereignty of the divine reason.
Revelation is expressed in written texts that constitute an “objective credo” of the church, “a number of propositions formulated in human words” including Scripture, the Creeds, and the Church Fathers (primarily Augustine) which constitute the “basic documents of the Catholic Church’s faith.”79 But these propositions do not stand alone, or in a system of self-reference. Rather they signify a res that is unavailable to unbelief. This objective credo compels humility before the ratio veritatis, and it requires a deepened form of reading (legere), an intus legere, “a special effort of understanding that goes beyond mere reading.”80 Apart from the Word and these authoritative texts, there is no “shadow credo” that can act as a rational standard. The Word of God as the object of faith can recognize no standard of rationality apart from itself:
Should he [Anselm] therefore have begun quaerens intellectum with nothing, that is with the rules of an autonomous human reason and with the data of general human experience, and therefore of his own accord as inveniens intellectum, that is by means of certain universal ‘necessities of thought’ (comparable to Pharaoh’s magicians), not so much have found but rather created a kind of shadow Credo?81
Kant’s transcendental rationality fails because it purports to be a standard of rationality apart from the Word. Kant cannot explain the divine reason: “[w]hat is meant by the human ratio with regard to Truth can therefore in no circumstances be one that is creative and normative.”82 The Word is its own standard: “The way in which the right use of the human ratio is determined primarily by its object is therefore, as it were, only the operation by means of which Truth, that is God himself, makes this decision.”83
For Barth, the dialogue between Anselm and Gaunilo is carried out on two completely different “planes.”84 The fool reasons from words, “[a] thing is conceived in one way when it is the word describing it that is conceived, in another way when the thing itself is known.”85 If one thinks of God in terms of words, God is a mere conception: One can think of the thing conceived as not existing. Gaunilo, on behalf of the fool, thinks of Anselm’s argument solely in terms of words and concepts without any regard to their object. For Gaunilo, propositions inform the theologian and lead him to appropriate conclusions: “[w]e can think of an object by thinking of the word that describes it, that is by obeying the directions which our thinking receives from the sign language of this word and so considering what claims to be the thought of the object concerned.”86 Gaunilo misunderstands Anselm’s designation for God as “any concept as it can be formed by man with or without regard to the object concerned.”87 For him, the credo is a matter of propositions, “a coherent continuity that is expressed logically and grammatically” which exists in intellectu. This understanding of the proclamation is shared by both faith and unbelief. However, only faith is aware of the res that the proclamation signifies.88
Anselm thinks on a different plane. To him, theological language is intrinsically uninformative: “[T]he aim of theology cannot be to lead men to faith, nor to confirm them in the faith, nor even to deliver their faith from doubt. Neither does the man who asks theological questions ask them for the sake of the existence of his faith; his theological answers, however complete they may be, can have no bearing on the existence of his faith.”89 Faith is beyond the human capacity of language: “[f]or as truth, that is the validity of the propositions of human knowledge, is entirely determined by the thing believed, so is this thing (meaning faith in this thing), utterly and completely independent of the validity of these human propositions”90:
Every theological statement is an inadequate expression of its object. The actual Word of Christ spoken to us is not an inadequate expression of its object, though of course every attempt on our part, even the highest and best, to reproduce that Word in thought or speech is inadequate. Strictly speaking, it is only God himself who has a conception of God. All that we have are conceptions of objects, none of which is identical with God. Even the most worthy descriptions are only relatively worthy of him. He is all that we are able to say about him and is not only wholly other, though certainly he alone is true and real, unique and in a category all his own and known only to himself. Therefore, every one of the categories known to us by which we attempt to conceive him is, in the last analysis, not really one of his categories at all. God shatters every syllogism.91
Propositions do not inform the theologian.92 They do not create the conditions by which truth or its understanding exists.93 The Word of God is true in itself (in re), not in language. Language cannot constitute a “shadow credo,” a neutral point of contact or an alternative objective standard apart from the Word itself, an analogy of being in words.94 For the analogia fidei, language is intrinsically inadequate. Analogy has nothing to do with language. The analogy exists in reality (in re) between the things and their creator. The res of the theologian’s own being participates in the Word of God, and that is the basis of analogy:
But just as everything which is not God could not exist apart from God and is something only because of God, with increasing intensity an aliqua imitatio illius essentiae [some imitation of that essence], so it is possible for expressions which are really appropriate only to objects that are not identical to God, to be true expressions, per aliquam similitudinem aut imaginem (ut cum vultum alicuius consideramus in speculo) [by means of some likeness or image as when we see someone’s face in a mirror], even when these expressions are applied to the God who can never be expressed.95
For Anselm because the actual analogy between the theologian and the Word exists in reality (in re), thinking in terms of words rather than their objects is delusional. Thinking about words has nothing to do with objective, as distinct from merely conceptual, existence. Any instruction from language would be “useless information about the inner consistency of Christian statements which would be completely incapable of preventing the person so informed from doubting, denying, and despising the whole thing as much as ever and, with the whole thing, the details too.”96 The inadequacy of thought stands or falls by what exists apart from its signs:
Thinking of the vox significans rem [word describing the thing] could only be true as an integrating element in any thinking of the res significata [the thing described]. The thinking of the vox significans rem in itself, in abstraction from the thought of something that really exists, or set over against it as something different, would have to be described as false.97
Any statement is “transitory and variable,” and its truth has “no permanence of its own.” Thinking in terms of language alone (cogitare vocem significatem) in abstraction is “false thinking:” “it is folly to think on this plane.”98
The Yale School interprets Barth as a theologian of linguistic technique. This interpretation runs directly counter to the Anselm commentary itself. Barth’s understanding of language does not anticipate Anglo American language philosophy or French theories of semiotics. Barth’s doctrine of language in the analogia fidei is entirely Augustinian, and it entails an Augustinian doctrine of illumination.99 In his dialogue De Magistro (The Teacher), Augustine argues that the student does not learn through language or the concepts in the teacher’s mind.100 The student learns the thing first and the sign second, only after the student knows the thing. The student learns not from what the teacher says but from the inner light of the Truth itself, which is Christ, who illumines “every rational soul.”101 What the teacher says or thinks is not determinative of what is taught or what the student actually learns.102 The student learns from what the teacher draws his attention to, even if that is different from what the teacher thinks it is.
Barth very clearly rejects the capacity of propositions to inform, as various passages from the Church Dogmatics confirm.103 But Barth’s view of language has implications that are not generally recognized, for example, his well-known subordination of the law of non-contradiction to the free activity of God.104 If the analogia fidei is not answerable to propositions, it is not answerable to their logical form, either. If a logical method were an independent source of truth, against which the theologian might assess revelation, it would then constitute “the rules of an autonomous human reason” or “certain universal ‘necessities of thought’ (comparable to Pharaoh’s magicians).”105 The Word of God is not logically neutral, even as the theologian follows the rules of logic within the law of non-contradiction.106
For the same reason the analogia fidei will not support any theory of “meaning.” Meaning presents a tangled area of language philosophy in which it is fruitless to involve Barth.107 A “meaning” requires an intention to refer to some object in such a way that the intention determines the object in question. If propositions were theologically informative, for example, the theologian would be required to know what they “mean”—how they determine their object. This is particularly true for Frei, who understands meaning as “intra-textual” or “semiotic,” such that reference, if fixed at all, is determined by a web of conceptions. But Barth does not think that God can be confined in this way. For Barth, the theologian’s intention to refer in faith involves not the conceptions (or language) of the theologian: It involves the Word of God as disclosed in revelation, apart from any meanings or conceptions at all.108 If Barth were to admit “meanings” as informative for theology, he would have to condition the divine activity on human intention and conception; he would have to concede that a form of human activity, separate from the Word, can determine what the Word is. Barth can make no such concession. For Barth, therefore, there are no theological meanings. It follows that Barth is not concerned with “beliefs,” if beliefs are understood as “propositional attitudes.”109 The Word of God cannot depend on the human capacity for belief. Faith is not an attitude about a proposition. Faith is participation in the truth: “a striving of the human will into God and so a “participation (in a limited manner limited by creatureliness) in God’s mode of Being and so a similar participation in God’s aseity, in the matchless glory of his very Self, and therefore also in God’s utter absence of necessity.”110
The revelation is the revelation of God in his world, the world which is so constituted that God’s Nature can be manifest therein in speculo, per similitudinem, per analogium [in a mirror, through a likeness, by analogy] (as far as God wills to reveal himself and has in fact revealed himself), even if in fact it is manifest to no one.111
Anselm addresses the fool as teacher to student. On what basis can he teach the fool? Anselm begins with their common humanity. Although they think on different planes and speak across an abyss, the theologian and the fool share the human condition. They share their human disability and incapacity, and because of that common humanity, they are in solidarity. Anselm does not overlook the fact that he has posed the same question about God’s existence that troubles the fool.112 “While the believer thinks differently from the fool he implicitly recognizes his human solidarity with him and the grace of God as the only thing that can break through and annul this solidarity.”113
The theologian and the fool also share theology. Through the analogia fidei the theologian and the fool participate in the divine Word itself, although on different planes. Anselm is therefore confident to show the fool the results of Anselm’s own argument, “In this all that we can do from the human side is to try to explore this ratio to the best of our knowledge and conscience with the aid of the documents of revelation and so to bring it before our opponent as something that has been investigated in order that it might speak for itself and might speak directly to him.”114 Anselm assumes that the fool can understand him: “We can start from Anselm’s astonishing recognition … that what the believer and the unbeliever are meaning and seeking in their questions is exactly the same.”115 Barth notes that “Anselm’s Proof works on the assumption that there is a solidarity between the theologian and the worldling which has not come about because the theologian has become one of the crowd, or one voice in an universal debating chamber, but because he is determined to address the worldling as one with whom he has at least this in common—theology.”116
The Word, the object of rational activity, informs the world in which both the theologian and the fool have their being. The theologian and the fool live and move in the divine creation, which is why Anselm can speak of faith directly to the fool and assume that the fool can understand him:
It may be, however, that Anselm could quite well have risked that astonishing assumption [i.e., a commonality between the believer and nonbeliever] because of the power of the objective ratio of the object of faith that enlightens and which, according to Anselm, was able to teach and all along did teach truths that are beyond the power of one human being to teach another.117
Barth replicates Anselm’s dialogue with the fool in the Barmen Declaration of 1934. The fool whom Barth addressed in 1934 was the Nazi state (which had substantial support from the German Protestant establishment). The distinction between the Word of God and the projections of thought is central to Barmen. The basis for this distinction lies in the analogia fidei. The Barmen Declaration affirms the Word of God against ideological projections: “Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death” (Article I).118
Barmen rejects political ideology as false doctrine; the church cannot recognize as a source of its proclamation “other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation” (Article I). Barmen rejects as false doctrine that the church could entrust its message to “prevailing ideological and political convictions” (Article III) or that the church could place the Word “in the service of any arbitrarily chosen desires, purposes, and plans” (Article VI). The Word is universal truth even if it is not recognized as such, “With its knowledge of God the church actualizes a possibility open to mankind but of which mankind as such cannot avail itself in practice because of the Fall—yet, for that very reason, a possibility whose reality must be insisted upon, and which within the church can be realized.”119 The proclamation of the Church is something quite different from an ideology or the particular language of a semiotic community. It is a universal proclamation that speaks to humanity. As such this proclamation is also a critique of all ideology, including the practices of particular semiotic communities. It is not a dialectical critique, but an analysis that follows from the positive theological assertions that the church makes according to the analogia fidei that follow from fides quaerens intellectum.
The analogia fidei provides a foundation for the proclamation of the church in “the cold light of secular thinking.”120 The church is not a gated community constituted by its language and form of life. If it were, the church would be one community among others in civil society, with no special authority. But the church is something quite different from a semiotic community; it is a universal community, the most fundamental community, in solidarity with the entire human family, including the fool. Anselm’s argument does not elevate religious language in order to constitute the church. Rather it sets limits on all language, so that the Word of God can constitute the church. Anselm’s argument also turns the theologian from the church to the world. Human beings, including the theologian, do not construct the world in thought. To the contrary, the world is God’s creation and therefore exists objectively in itself, beyond any conception, mental ideal, against any ideology. But though we do not create the world, through faith we can understand it. By confessing this faith, the church can point to the divine Word on which the world is structured, against ideology, against any forces that might seek the world’s dissolution.
1. Karl Barth, Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum, Anselm’s Proof of the Existence of God in the Context of His Theological Scheme, trans. Ian W. Robertson from the Second German edition of 1958 (1960; rpt. 1985). Extracts from Barth’s Anselm are copyright Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum by Karl Barth, trans. I.W. Robertson © SCM Press 1960 and are reproduced by permission of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd. I have provided translations of Anselm’s Latin in brackets, in italics. The M.J. Charlesworth translation of St. Anselm’s Proslogion (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979) has been helpful. I refer to Barth’s Church Dogmatics by volume and part, with page numbers indicated. An earlier article of mine, “Karl Barth on St. Anselm: A Theological Response to the Dilemma of Liberal Theory,” Graven Images I 1994, pp. 37-51, sought to enlist Barth in debates about legal theory but failed to address the larger question of how Americans actually read Barth. I want to acknowledge three extraordinary teachers and friends: Leonard V. Kaplan, Terry Penner, and Frederick R. Trost, for their insight, conversation, and encouragement. I also thank Joseph Alden Bassett and Gabriel Fackre, for providing forums in which I could develop my views.
2. Anselm, 1033–1109, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109, made his famous “ontological argument” for the existence of God in his Proslogion.
3. Barth, Anselm, 35–40.
4. Barth, Anselm, 39–40.
5. Barth, Anselm, 39.
6. In a preface to the second edition of the Anselm commentary nearly 30 years later, Barth suggested that he was working with “a vital key, if not the key” to an understanding of the thought underlying his monumental Church Dogmatics (Barth, Anselm, 11). Anselm is woven into the fabric of the Church Dogmatics. See, for example, Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1, 4.
7. See Hans Ur von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, trans. Edward T. Oakes, S.J. (San Francisco: Communio Books, Ignatius Press, 1992), 107–113. Thomas Torrance: “From Dialectical to Dogmatic Thinking,” Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology, 1910–1931 (1962; reprint, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 48–132, and Eberhard Jüngel, Karl Barth: A Theological Legacy, trans. Garrett E. Paul (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), 33–52. See also Steven G. Smith, The Argument to the Other: Reason Beyond Reason in the Thought of Karl Barth and Emmanuel Levinas (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983), 119–164.
8. Jüngel, Karl Barth: A Theological Legacy, 41.
9. The analogia fidei is Barth’s term, not Anselm’s. Barth does not expressly refer to the analogia fidei in the Anselm commentary; however, it is the subject of the commentary. Barth discusses analogia fidei in Chapter V, “The Knowledge of God,” Church Dogmatics II.1, 3–254, especially, 225 and ff. Barth derives the term analogia fidei from Paul’s Greek in Romans 1:6. Church Dogmatics I.1, 243–244.
10. Jüngel, Karl Barth: A Theological Legacy, 43. For background to the Barmen Declaration of 1934, see Arthur C. Cochrane, The Church’s Confession Under Hitler (1962; reprint, Pittsburgh, PA: The Pickwick Press, 1976), and Klaus Scholder, The Churches and The Third Reich, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988).
11. Barth, Church Dogmatics I.1, 243–244.
12. See Barth’s discussion of analogy in Church Dogmatics II.1, 63–85. Barth’s rejection of natural theology is found in his famous reply to Emil Brunner, “No” in Natural Theology Comprising “Nature and Grace” by Professor Dr. Emil Brunner and The Reply “No” by Dr. Karl Barth, trans. Peter Fraenkel (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2002).
13. Jüngel speaks of a “phobia” or “anxiety” that “the little word ontological” triggers among Barth scholars. Eberhard Jüngel, God’s Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth, trans. John Webster (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2001), 129–130.
14. Barth accepts the analogia entis if it is understood as subordinate to the analogia fidei. On this point he quotes with approval the Catholic writer Gottlieb Söhngen: “Therefore the participatio fidei cannot be opposed to the participatio entis. On the contrary, it is a participation in being—‘not a gracious participation in God by reason of a purely human ability for participation, but a truly human participation in God by reason only of the divine power of grace.’” Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1, 82.
15. Graham Ward adopts both alternatives: “Barth’s work can be read both as Neo-Kantian and part of ‘the dissolutive tendencies already apparent in the great early twentieth-century avant-garde movements … key event[s] for the definition of the post-modern.” Graham Ward, Barth, Derrida and the Theology of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 58.
16. “On the basis of this brief survey, it is clear that what is ‘new’ in the Anselm book is at most a relatively more faithful unfolding of the dogmatic method which Barth had been employing since 1924. There is no new starting-point here, and no new thought-form.” Bruce C. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 441.
17. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic, 129–130. McCormack is not alone in suggesting that Barth remained a Kantian. See also Graham Ward, “Barth, Modernity and Postmodernity,” and Trevor Hart, “Revelation,” in Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. John Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 274–95, 37–56.
18. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic, 129. “Moreover, there is no epistemological way which leads from the empirical world to its divine source. The metaphysical way taken by classical realism would remain forever closed to Barth. To that extent, Barth’s brand of realism depended for its existence on the success of the critical element in idealism. Indeed, without idealism, it would have been unthinkable.” McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic, 130.
19. My discussion here is indebted to the best single analysis of Barth’s dialectical theology, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s habilitation dissertation, Act and Being: Transcendental Philosophy and Ontology in Systematic Theology, Works, Volume 2, trans. H. Martin Rumscheidt (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996). See my earlier article “Karth Barth on St. Anselm,” 39–42. Bonhoeffer’s critique in Act and Being is much more substantive and significant than his famous but cryptic comment in his prison letters that Barth’s theology of revelation had become a “positivism of revelation.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: MacMillan, 1972), 328.
20. For a discussion of Barth’s early influences, see Simon Fisher, Revelatory Positivism: Barth’s Earliest Theology and The Marburg School (1988; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 21. Karl Barth, “Fate and Idea in Theology,” in The Way of Theology in Karl Barth: Essays and Comments, ed. H. Martin Rumscheidt, trans. George Hunsinger (Allison Park, Pa: Pickwick Publications, 1986), 25–61. Bonhoeffer, in his critique of the dialectical Barth in Act and Being refers in particular to these lectures.
22. Barth, “Fate and Idea,” 32–42.
23. Barth here associates idealism with Kant but also Plato and Augustine, “the great idealist among the theologians”! See “Fate and Idea,” 42–51.
24. Barth, “Fate and Idea,” 48.
25. Barth, “Fate and Idea,” 51–60.
26. Barth, “Fate and Idea,” 59. “If we human beings are sinners lost and condemned, and if as such we wad up the reality and truth of our existence into an ultimate word and call it the Word of God, then how could the majesty imagined of this God be anything other than the majestas Diaboli? This particular “wholly other”—the one that is only our mirror image, the keystone in the arches of our culture and for that reason no “wholly other” at all, but simply the last in a long line of human works—this wholly other can be nothing for us but judgment without grace. For precisely when we want to find God in it, believing we have spoken our ultimate word, we remain alone with ourselves, shut up in our prison of distance, alienation and hostility toward God. That is why the cult of any God won through dialectics is monkish legalism, indeed a fatal legalism, no less than any other.” Barth, “Fate and Idea,” 56.
27. See Paul D. Matheny, Dogmatics and Ethics: The Theological Realism and Ethics of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Peter Lang, 1990), especially, 46–72.
28. Barth calls Kant’s refutation of Anselm’s argument “nonsense” (Barth, Anselm, 171), and he rejects transcendental thinking: “[w]hat is meant by the human ratio with regard to Truth can therefore in no circumstances be one that is creative and normative” (Barth, Anselm, 46–47).
29. Barth, Anselm, 15–17, also, 26.
30. Barth, Anselm, 26.
31. Barth, Anselm, 45–46.
32. Barth’s claim that faith is knowledge is fundamental to his theology: Faith seeks and finds knowledge of its object. This claim, at times, appears to test the humility and indirection required by faith itself, which at best sees in a glass darkly, by analogy, as Barth himself acknowledges, “But even in the Christian this being known, the divine possibility, remains distinct from the human possibility of knowing; this cannot exhaust it; there is only similarity, analogy. To see God ‘face to face’ without dissimilarity must await the eternal consummation even in the case of Christians.” Barth, Church Dogmatics I.1, 244. Notwithstanding these qualifications, Barth finds actual knowledge in faith. Barth translates Anselm’s “intellectus” [understanding] as “knowledge” [Erkenntnis]. Similarly, he translates Anselm’s “intellegere” [to understand] as “to know” [erkennen]. See Karl Barth, Fides Quaerens Intellectum: Anselms Beweis der Existenz Gottes im Zusammenhang seines theologischen Programms (Zollikon: Evangelischer Verlag, 1958). I suggest that with his claim to knowledge, Barth wants to affirm a form of understanding beyond concepts, especially those construed in Neo-Kantian transcendentalism, in faith the theologian encounters what is true, actual, and fundamental beyond his own thinking. I suggest further that Barth wanted to recall the premodern dogmatics of the Reformers, for whom faith is a form of knowledge. See Edward A. Dowey, Jr., The Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994).
33. Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, trans. G.T. Thomson (New York: Harper & Row: 1959), 25. See also, 22–27.
34. Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 26.
35. Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 26.
36. See George Hunsinger, “Postliberal Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 42–57. And Bruce L. McCormack, “Between Nonfoundational and Postmodern Readings of Barth,” in Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 109–165. George Lindbeck cites Barth’s exegetical work as a chief source of his notion of “intratextuality.” George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), 135. Lindbeck’s book was received as
(in the words of David Tracy) “a methodologically sophisticated version of Barthian confessionalism.” Tracy is quoted George Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000), 306. For a critique of the appropriation of Barth by the Yale School see Mark I. Wallace, The Second Naivete: Barth, Ricoeur, and the New Yale Theology (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1990).
37. McCormack calls Frei “the guiding spirit of Yale theology”: “Thus, from at least 1974 (if not earlier) right down to the present day, the word ‘Barthianism’ has been understood by the great majority in American theological circles to be virtually synonymous with the views of Hans Frei and his associates.” Bruce L. McCormack, “Between Nonfoundational and Postmodern Readings of Barth,” in Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth, 115. See also John Allan Knight, “The Barthian Heritage of Hans W. Frei,” Scottish Journal of Theology, 61 (2008), 307–326.
38. Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975). See also Hans Frei, “The ‘Literal Reading’ of Biblical Narrative in the Christian Tradition: Does it Stretch or Will it Break?” in Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays, eds. George Hunsinger and William C. Placher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 117–152.
39. On Frei’s influences, see Theology and Narrative.
40. “Meaning is constituted by the uses of a specific language rather than being distinguishable from it. Thus the proper way to determine what ‘God’ signifies, for example, is by examining how the word operates within a religion and thereby shapes reality and experience rather than by first establishing its propositional or experiential meaning and reinterpreting or reforming its uses accordingly. It is in this sense that theological description in the cultural-linguistic mode is intrasemiotic or intratextual.” George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), 113–114.
41. “In the self-description of the Christian community, the function of ‘scripture’ as a concept—it does not contain a ‘meaning’ apart from interpretation or use in the Church—is to shape and constrain the reader, so that he or she discovers the very capacity to subordinate himself to it.” Frei, Types of Christian Theology, 86.
42. Frei, Types of Christian Theology, 38–46.
43. Frei, Types of Christian Theology, 78. For Frei, Barth in his dogmatics anticipated “Anglo-Saxon philosophy of language and French theories of semiotics and semantics.” Frei, Types of Christian Theology, 45.
44. Frei, Types of Christian Theology, 78. “Specifically, we don’t have more than our concepts of God; we don’t have a separate intuition, a preconceptual or prelinguistic apprehension or grasp of God in his reality, either; for the reality of God is given in, with, and under the concept and not separably, and that is adequate for us.” Frei, Types of Christian Theology, 79.
45. Frei, Types of Christian Theology, 45.
46. Analogy is a technical device for “redescribing conceptually and by means of a series of fluid juxtapositions (of figures, images, events, persons, points of view) the teleological, temporal flow of the divine-human relation, of which the New Testament depiction of Jesus Christ gives at once the foundation and the aim.” Frei, Types of Christian Theology, 160. See also: 40–41, 79, and 160–61. “Ever since his book on Anselm’s Proslogion’s argument for the existence of God, Barth regarded reason as conceptually descriptive effort, as one, though only one, of the legitimate shapes of faith, the shape taken by the theological endeavor. But the appropriate ruled language use of that description is irreducible to any other. Hence he thought that while any and all technical philosophical concepts and conceptual schemes could be employed in Christian theology, they could only be used formally: One must remain agnostic about all their material claims to be describing the ‘real’ world, even or especially when these schemes are anthropological and metaphysical in nature; and Barth did among other ones use anthropological and metaphysical schemes in his theology. In order not to become trapped by his philosophy, it is best for a theologian to be philosophically eclectic, in any given case employing the particular ‘conceptuality’ or conceptualities (to put it in the German mode) that serve best to cast into relief the particular theological subject matter under consideration. The subject matter governs concepts as well as method, not vice versa.” Frei, Types of Christian Theology, 161–62.
47. Frei, Types of Christian Theology, 79.
48. Frei, Types of Christian Theology, 159. George Hunsinger, a Barth scholar who seeks to advance Frei’s approach, reworks Lindbeck’s cultural linguistic typology (he calls it a “sympathetic reworking … more plausibly along postliberal lines”) in order to accommodate Barth. George Hunsinger, “Postliberal Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Post Modern Theology, ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 42–57.; How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000). Hunsinger interprets the Anselm commentary as enabling an “Anselmian coherentism.” For Hunsinger, Anselm’s “faith seeking understanding” constitutes a technique, a “rationalist procedure,” for generating theological propositions through “coherentist modes of justification”…”only within a network of doctrines and beliefs.” See Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth, ix, 54–64, and 281 n.1.
49. Barth, Anselm, 62.
50. Barth, Anselm, 123.
51. Barth, Anselm, 89.
52. Barth, Anselm, 90. See also, 104.
53. Barth, Anselm, 128.
54. Barth, Anselm, 103, 94.
55. Barth, Anselm, 128.
56. In his Monologion, Anselm had used an ontic formulation for God: God is the greatest, highest, or best. His breakthrough in the Proslogion is a new formulation that avoids such formulations. See Barth, Anselm, 57–58, 84–89, and 84 n. 4.
57. Barth, Anselm, 75.
58. Barth, Anselm, 75.
59. Barth, Anselm, 75.
60. Barth, Anselm, 153 n.1.
61. Barth, Anselm, 89.
62. Barth, Anselm, 74–75.
63. Barth, Anselm, 116–117.
64. Barth, Church Dogmatics I.1, 243–244.
65. Barth, Anselm, 117.
66. Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1, 75 ff.
67. (rectitudo mente sola perceptibilis) Barth, Anselm, 18.
68. Barth, Anselm, 18.
69. Barth, Anselm, 45.
70. Barth, Anselm, 99–100.
71. Barth, Anselm, 154–155.
72. Barth, Anselm, 45–46.
73. Barth, Anselm, 98.
74. Barth, Anselm, 46.
75. Barth, Anselm, 19.
76. Barth, Anselm, 43–44.
77. Barth, Church Dogmatics I.1,15.
78. Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1, 226.
79. Barth, Anselm, 24.
80. Barth, Anselm, 42.
81. Barth, Anselm, 53–54.
82. Barth, Anselm, 46–47.
83. Barth, Anselm, 46.
84. On Gaunilo’s plane of thought, see Barth, Anselm, 63 ff. and 79–89. On two modes of thinking, see Barth, Anselm, 163–168.
85. Anselm, Proslogion 4. Quoted in Barth, Anselm, 163.
86. Barth, Anselm, 163.
87. Barth, Anselm, 82.
88. Barth, Anselm, 24–25.
89. Barth, Anselm, 17.
90. Barth, Anselm, 18.
91. Barth, Anselm, 29.
92. Barth’s rejection of propositions separates him from Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher, who understood Christian doctrine as an account of “Christian religious affections set forth in speech,” as exact and didactic “dogmatic propositions.” See Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, eds. H.R. Macintosh and J.S. Stewart (London: T&T Clark, 1999, rpt. 2005), §§ 15–20, 76–95.
93. Bruce D. Marshall argues that for theology propositions are “truth bearers,” Bruce D. Marshall, Trinity and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 12. Hunsinger adopts Marshall as a model postliberal theologian. See Hunsinger, “Postliberal Theology,” 52–53.
94. Eberhard Jüngel makes the point that God cannot come to speech as a name only, a nomen. Language cannot capture God on its own terms. If it could, language would constitute what Jüngel calls “the analogia entis per analogiam nominum.” “By analogia nominum, we understand the undertaking which, on the basis of certain presuppositions, claims to be able to capture revelation from language.” Eberhard Jüngel, God’s Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2001), trans. John Webster, 23, n. 32. On language, see Jüngel’s insightful discussion, especially, 17–53.
95. Barth, Anselm, 29–30.
96. Barth, Anselm, 69–70.
97. Barth, Anselm, 164.
98. Barth, Anselm, 164–165.
99. For Anselm Augustine has primacy among the church fathers who with Scripture and the Creeds constitute the “objective Credo” of the church (Barth, Anselm, 22–26). Anselm credits Augustine among the church fathers as “the norm if not the source of his thinking” (Barth, Anselm, 23). Augustine, along with Plotinus and Plato, constitute Anselm’s “philosophical ancestry” (Barth, Anselm, 59). Barth suggests that Anselm’s demonstration is an advance on Augustine (Barth, Anselm, 84–85 and n. 4). Barth also distances Anselm from Augustine’s doctrine of memory (Barth, Anselm, 20, n. 4). Barth avoids aspects of Augustine’s theology that appear to acknowledge an immanent capability for knowledge outside of the Word. See Barth’s discussion of Augustine’s doctrine of the vestigium trinitatis in Barth, Church Dogmatics I.1, 333–349. Jüngel distinguishes Augustine’s “hermeneutic of signification” in De Doctrina Christiana from Barth’s analogia fidei. God’s Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth, 17–27. I think that Augustine’s view of language in De Magistro accords with the analogia fidei. For Barth on illumination, see Dogmatics in Outline, 22–27. See also Barth, Anselm, 27, 48, and 64. On Augustine’s doctrine of illumination, see Scott MacDonald, “The Divine Nature,” and Gareth B. Matthews, “Knowledge and Illumination,” in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, eds. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 71–90 and 171–185.
100. Augustine, The Teacher in Against the Academicians and The Teacher, trans. Peter King (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1995). Anselm was in this regard as others an Augustinian. See Peter King, “Anselm’s Philosophy of Language,” in The Cambridge Companion to Anselm, Brian Davies and Brian Leftow eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
101. Augustine, The Teacher, 139.
102. “Accordingly, words don’t have even the minimal function of indicating the speaker’s mind, since it’s uncertain whether he knows the truth of what he says … Do teachers hold that it is their thoughts that are perceived and grasped rather than the very disciplines they take themselves to pass on by speaking? After all, who is so foolishly curious as to send his son to school to learn what the teacher thinks? When the teachers have explained by means of words all the disciplines they profess to teach, even the disciplines of virtue and of wisdom, then those who are called “students” consider within themselves whether truths have been stated. They do so by looking upon the inner Truth, according to their abilities. That is therefore the point at which they learn.” Augustine, The Teacher, 142–143, 145.
103. “We have said something positive by the reference, of course, only to the extent that it was a reference, i.e., a reference to the event of the real knowledge of the Word of God. The power of this reference does not lie in itself; it lies in that to which it refers.” Barth, Church Dogmatics 1.1, 197. “With our views, concepts and words, we have no claim on Him, that He should be their object. He Himself, however, has every—the best founded and most valid—claim on us and on all our views, concepts and words, that He should be their first and last and proper subject. Therefore, He does not annul His truth or deny it, nor does He establish a double truth, nor does He place us in the doubtful position of an ‘as if’ cognition, when He allows and commands us in His revelation to make use of our views, concepts and thoughts to describe Himself, His Word, and His deeds. On the contrary, He establishes the one truth, His own, as the truth of our views, concepts and words. But again, this is not because they are appropriate for it or because the originally mean Him apart from this one truth. As our own they simply do not do this.” Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1, 229.
104. “Even the minimum postulate of freedom from contradiction is acceptable to theology only when it is given a particular interpretation which the scientific theorist can hardly tolerate, namely, that theology does not affirm in principle that the ‘contradictions’ which it makes cannot be resolved. But the statements in which it maintains their resolution will be statements concerning the free activity of God and not therefore statements which ‘dismiss contradictions from the world.’” Barth, Church Dogmatics I.1, 9. See also Terry Penner: “The world of real fact and real existence is the subject matter of the substantial sciences, while logic concerns itself only with the existentially and factually neutral structure just mentioned. On such a picture logic would be a neutral tool of inquiry into all substantial scientific and philosophical matters.” Terry Penner, The Ascent From Nominalism: Some Existence Arguments in Plato’s Middle Dialogues, Philosophical Studies Series Volume 37 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1987), 169.
105. Barth, Anselm, 53–54.
106. Barth, Anselm, 55.
107. See “Meaning” in the Index and List of Entries to the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Ted Honderich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1033.
108. See Terry Penner: “The argument from the sciences must accordingly be based ultimately upon an appeal to the real natures which the scientist seeks to discover. The science of oncology is premised upon the existence of a real nature of cancer (or a real nature of the growing cell, or whatever), a nature which is what it is regardless of how we may conceptualize it, and which oncologists are trying to discover. It is not even partially determined by oncologist’s ways of talking about it or by their ways of referring to it.” Terry Penner, Ascent from Nominalism: Some Existence Arguments in Plato’s Middle Dialogues, 40. See also Terry Penner, “Aristotle’s Dilemma” in Ascent from Nominalism: Some Existence Arguments in Plato’s Middle Dialogues, 1–56, 141–80.
109. For Bruce Marshall, whom I take to be representative of postliberal theology, Christian belief “is an attitude or disposition expressible by holding a sentence true … Believing is thus a propositional attitude, that is, an attitude (in this case, holding true) toward a sentence the meaning or interpretation of which the believer understands or has specified.” Marshall, Trinity and Truth, 10.
110. Barth, Anselm, 17.
111. Barth, Anselm, 117.
112. Barth, Anselm, 157.
113. Barth, Anselm, 105.
114. Barth, Anselm, 64.
115. Barth, Anselm, 66.
116. Barth, Anselm, 68.
117. Barth, Anselm, 70 -71. It should be quite clear that Anselm’s dialogue with the fool has nothing to do with the “ad hoc apologetics” that the Yale School reads into the Anselm commentary. See Frei, Types of Christian Theology, 161.
118. For the Barmen Declaration, I have used the Arthur C. Cochrane translation, The Church’s Confession Under Hitler, 237–242.
119. Barth, Anselm, 117.
120. Barth, Anselm, 68.