194 - Karl Barth, His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts

Karl Barth, His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts
By Eberhard Busch; translated by John Bowden
Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1976. 569 pp. $19.95.

Karl Barth was not only a profound and prolific theologian, he was also a prodigious personality. It is this aspect of the man that is presented in this book. Barth himself began to write an autobiography in his last years, but he did not get beyond the first chapter, which dealt with his ancestors. Eberhard Busch, a Swiss pastor, who is curator of the Barth archives in Basel, has completed the task which Barth left unfinished, and he has done it largely in Barth's own words, taken from letters, records of conversations, and other writings of a personal nature, which he has skillfully woven together. The book is enriched with over a hundred photographs showing Barth at various stages of his life, from early infancy to the eve of his death, sometimes alone or, more characteristically, in the company of family or friends and associates. The portrait that emerges from the book as a whole is that of an extraordinary human being, an original of the first water, incomparable, inimitable, and irreplaceable, with a rare combination of energy, involvement, independence, courage, and humor.

I

From his student years, Barth was an indefatigable worker. He did his home-work thoroughly, and when he was drawn to some line of research, he would pursue it day and night. He continued in this manner throughout his life. He drove himself at a furious pace, sometimes to a point when sheer exhaustion compelled him to take a vacation-and vacation was often little more than a change of place for work. His capacity for work was colossal, as the bulk of his writings shows-and they were only a part of it; for Barth was also a man of action, and the record of his activities occupies a large part of this book.

Barth's involvement in public affairs began when he was a student when he persuaded his fraternity to concern itself with the poor, as well as with merry-making and beer-drinking. During his pastorate in a small industrial town, he espoused the cause of the workers in the factories and took a leading part in organizing them in trade unions-an activity which did not ingratiate him with the factory-owners, some of whom were leading members of the church. Later as a professor in Bonn, he became involved in a more sinister and dangerous issue, with the rise of Hitler, and he became the acknowledged theological leader in the movement to protect the integrity of the church against the

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threats to which it was exposed. The book provides a detailed account of the part he played in the struggle of the confessing church, until he was dismissed from his chair. It is interesting to learn that his appointment to a chair of theology in Basel, which followed immediately (Barth records that he was unemployed for just one day) was brought about chiefly through the efforts of two atheist members of the cantonal council-a fact that confirms what I was told on a visit to Basel shortly afterwards, that the appointment was made, not out of enthusiasm for Barth, who had left in Switzerland a reputation as a trouble-maker, but um Hitler zu ärgern (to annoy Hitler).

The years in Basel were the period of his crowning theological achievement-and of his decline. For Barth, they were happy years (despite four house moves), but they were not peaceful. His compatriots, who desired nothing so much as not to annoy Hitler, were upset by his continued outspokenness and took measures to restrain him. And after the war was over, they were even more upset by his unoutspokenness about the threat of communism and its lurid demonstration at the time of the Hungarian uprising. Barth was excoriated by many, including Reinhold Niebuhr, for his strange "silence about Hungary," and Barth's attempts to defend his attitude were widely regarded as exercises in sophistry, if not something more serious-his telephone was tapped, and he caught the attention of the C.I.A. It seems clear that, despite his claim to an irenic disposition, Barth enjoyed controversy and thrived on it.

The independent or non-conformist streak in Barth's make-up manifested itself already in his student days. He listened attentively to his teachers and gladly received some of the things he learned from them, but he was never satisfied with any of them; and when he entered the pastorate, his dissatisfaction steadily mounted to the point at which he realized that he would have to unlearn practically all that he had learned from them and seek a "wholly other" foundation for theology (as it was expressed by his friend, Thurneysen, in a casual conversation). It was no easy task. The critical seriousness of the quest he undertook is reflected, outwardly, in the fact that his two major works, Romans and the Dogmatics, failed to satisfy him in their first form and had to be begun all over again, and, inwardly, in the repeated changes in method and conceptuality that are to be observed in successive volumes of the Church Dogmatics.

One of Barth's distinctive and engaging characteristics was his humor, which was more often than not directed at himself. Whether it was a gift of nature or of grace, it was entirely consonant with his understanding of his vocation. Barth saw the theologian, and indeed every Christian, as a witness; and his model for this was the figure of John the Baptist in Grünewald's Isenheim altar painting, which is reproduced in the frontispiece of this book and which hung on the wall of Barth's study beside the portraits of Calvin and Mozart. In the picture, John stands to one side and points with an insistent finger at the cruci-

196 - Karl Barth, His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts

fied Christ at the center, with the words, "He must increase, but I must decrease" (Jn. 3:30). If a witness must efface himself, he cannot take himself too seriously, and this Barth never did. He was always uncomfortable with the thought that there were people called "Barthians"; he was glad to have disciples, if they were willing to think with him, and beyond him, so that he could learn from them, but not partisans who merely parroted his thought. Even at the height of his fame he did not succumb to the adulation of multitudes of admirers, except perhaps for a certain indulgence in self-dramatization, which becomes increasingly evident in his later writings, but which is always tempered by his self-deprecating humor.

II

While the story is one of absorbing human interest, the question of its theological significance is not an easy one to answer. Paul Tillich made a point of the fact that there was a close correlation between his own life and his thought; and the authors of a two-volume work on Tillich have been severely reprimanded by one crititc for assigning the life to one volume and the thought to another, putting asunder what he himself joined together. Both the author and the translator of this volume express the view that Barth's life-story is an important background to understanding his theology. But this is only partly true. Barth himself has recorded that when he assumed the role of a dogmatic theologian, the step was viewed with dismay by some who had welcomed him in his earlier role as a rebel, and to whom it seemed little short of betrayal. From that time many of his disciples went back and walked no more with him.

The transition did involve a certain withdrawal, especially when it came to the writing of the Church Dogmatics. There is also the fact that Barth's theology made a profound impact on many people in many parts of the world who were not acquainted with him and knew little or nothing of his personality or his history. Will they understand his theology better through reading the story of his life? Would any reader of the Church Dogmatics, which a Swiss commentator once likened to a great river flowing between uninhabited shores through an apocalyptic landscape, guess that its author was a man who had been repeatedly in conflict with the establishment, ecclesiastical, theological, and political, a man who in an earlier age would probably have been thrown into prison, or even burned at the stake?

In his own Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, Barth gives only the barest biographical information about the theologians he discusses, and in only two instances does he mention marriage, one because it brought wealth, the other because it brought trouble. And in this respect, it may be noted, Barth receives somewhat similar treatment from his biographer; for his engagment and marriage are only briefly recorded, and his wife makes only rare appearances in the story thereafter, not even at the birth of her own children. She was evidently

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a most self-effacing lady, who played second fiddle to her husband's devoted and accomplished secretary, Charlotte von Kirschbaum, who labored with him at the production of the Church Dogmatics (eight pages a day each working day, every word written, and sometimes rewritten by his own hand), and who accompanied him on his travels and vacations. It is hardly suprising to read that this ménage á trois was viewed with considerable misgiving by members of his family, especially his mother.

The relation between a man's life and his thought, if it is not merely a question of how his thought developed in the course of his life but rather of how the kind of man he was is reflected in his thought, can take different forms. The English philosopher, G. R. G. Mure, wrote: "The biography of a philosopher gains importance only so far as he fails to express himself fully in his writings, and it then serves to explain his failure rather than his philosophy." This seems an extreme position, but the example of Kant might be cited in support of it. Would anyone gain a better understanding of Kant's philosophy from his life history, since, as Heine put it, Kant had neither life nor history? But on the other hand, is it altogether coincidence that Kant, with his wall of separation between noumenon and phenomenon, as well as the other architects of the great dualisms of modern philosophy, Descartes with his bifurcation of reality into thinking substance and extended substance, and, above all, Kierkegaard with his infinite qualitative difference between time and eternity, were all bachelors, men who never found the way to the opposite sex, while Hegel, who framed the greatest synthesis ever conceived by the human mind, was a happily married man (to say nothing of his extra-curricular activities before marriage)?

The relation between a man's life and his thought can also be inverse. In his recent book on Vico and Herder, Sir Isaiah Berlin remarks of the latter that the ideal of humanity which he propounded was "the polar opposite of Herder's own character and conduct," for he was (among other things) "touchy, resentful, bitter, neurotic, pedantic, difficult, suspicious, and often insupportable." He cites some others in whom a similar inverse relation between life and thought may be observed, a notable example among them being Nietzsche, the furious prophet of the over-man and the will to power, who was himself a gentle, sensitive, myopic, dyspeptic, insomniac, and, at the end, paretic professor of classical philology, who could not stay on a horse. I heard one of my own teachers point to the same phenomenon among theologians many years ago. He noted that the theologians who stressed the sovereignty of God and the impotence of man-such as Luther and Calvin-were strong-willed, masterful personalities, and he suspected that Barth, who was just beginning to be known at the time, might fall in the same category. It is clear from this biography that while Barth had many amiable qualities he was not afflicted with a sense of fallibility. There is an amusing story of an occasion when he was returning

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from a conference which had broken down. A friend asked him, "Why must you always be right?" Barth replied, "But I am right."

There is one aspect of Barth's personality that is reflected in his writing. He was very fond of music, a performer of sorts on the violin, and a passionate devotee of the music of Mozart. He began every day by listening to a piece by Mozart on his hi-fi, and when he went to his desk to work on the Church Dogmatics, the effect carried over; for often, especially in the later volumes, the thesis at the head of the section is treated as a theme, and the exposition consists of a series of variations on it, rather than a demonstration of it by discursive reasoning.

III

In spite of his originality and independence, Barth was, like all of us, conditioned by his milieu, and this can best be seen by one who looks at him from an entirely different milieu. Barth came from a line of preachers in an old family, which was well established in Basel, and he shows this in several ways. His piety seems to have been part of his family inheritance, and it is sometimes difficult to see how it is related to his theology. He spoke of heaven, and of going there and listening to the angels play Mozart. How seriously he meant this is, of course, open to question. At any rate, no such future is envisaged for any of us in the section of the Church Dogmatics which deals with man in his "Ending Time."

By the same token, Barth seems to have had faith in his blood-and a particularly vigorous strain at that. There is no evidence that he ever experienced a moment of doubt. Newman said that "ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt," but Barth's faith seems to have been immune to both doubts and difficulties (notably in exegesis, for there was no text so hard that he could not squeeze a meaning out of it). It was easy for him to dispense with natural theology and apologetics; he had no need of such props for his faith, like weaker brethren. And one wonders if this may not have contributed to his eventual decline. Can a theologian be a witness to this generation, to any generation, who does not know doubt? Is the bold, upstanding figure of John the Baptist in Grünewald's picture the appropriate witness to the One on the cross, who was made perfect through suffering? After all, John had his doubts.

As everyone knows, Barth is now in eclipse. Whether he will come back, no one knows. But there are some among us who can never forget the debt we owe to him, even if we have to unlearn some of the things he gave us. And meanwhile, we shall prize this portrait of the man.

George S. Hendry
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey