Karl Barth's Tin Ear: Notes, But No Melody

IN THE PRIOR POST REGARDING KARL BARTH, we quoted Stephen Grabill's observation that the followers of Barth's theological and philosophical presuppositions regarding natural theology led them, as well as Barth, to reject a natural law theory of morality, and predisposed them toward a "divine-command ethic saddled with the concomitant problems of actualism and occasionalism." (Grabill, 23.)

The concept of actualism is a difficult one, but it is one of Karl Barth's principal motifs. George Hunsinger, the Director of Princeton Seminary's Center for Barth Studies, provides a lengthy explanation of this Barthian concept which warrants quotation in full:

Actualism is the most distinctive and perhaps the most difficult of the motifs [in Barth's theology]. It is present whenever Barth speaks, as he constantly does, in the language of occurrence, happening, event, history, decision. At the most general level it means that he thinks primarily in terms of events and relationships rather than monadic or self-contained substances. So pervasive is this motif that Barth's whole theology might well be described as a theology of active relations. God and humanity are both defined in fundamentally actualistic terms.

For example, when Barth wants to describe the living God in a technical way, he says that God's being is always a being in act. Negatively, this means that God's being cannot be described apart from the basic act in which God lives. Any attempt to define God in static or inactive terms, as is customary in certain theologies and philosophies, is therefore to be rejected. Positively, the description means that God lives in a set of active relations. The being of God in act is a being in love and freedom. God, who does not need us to be the living God, is perfectly complete without us. For God is alive in the active relations of love and freedom which constitute God's being in and for itself. These are the active relations of God's trinitarian self-differentiation. From all eternity the Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. God is free to be God, to constitute the divine being, in this distinctively trinitarian way. God is the Lord, the acting subject, of this self-constituting, mysterious event. Although there is much more to it than this, the basic point of the actualism can already be suggested, as far as the doctrine of God is concerned. Actualism emphasizes the sovereign activity of God in patterns of love and freedom--not only in God's self relationship, but also in relationship to others (II/1, 257-321).

As far as human beings are concerned, the basic point is to understand them strictly with regard to the pattern of God's sovereign activity. Negatively, this means that we human beings have no ahistorical relationship to God, and that we also have no capacity in and of ourselves to enter into fellowship with God. An ahistorical relationship would be a denial of God's activity, and an innate capacity for fellowship would be a denial of God's sovereignty. Positively, therefore, our relationship to God must be understood in active, historical terms, and it must be a relationship given to us strictly from the outside. Our active relationship to God is a history of love and freedom; we are capable of it not because it stands at our disposal, but because we who stand at God's disposal are given it. Our relationship to God is therefore an event. It is not possessed once and for all, but is continually established anew by the ongoing activity of grace. Paradoxically, however although befalling us from the outside and exceeding our creaturely capacities, the event of grace deeply enhances rather than diminishes us. It draws us beyond ourselves into a relationship of communion, of love and freedom, with God. The sovereignty of grace is thus not the negation, but the condition for the possibility, of human spontaneity and fulfillment. God's sovereignty in our lives is enacted as God establishes us with a history of love and freedom.

Barth's theology of active relations is therefore a theology which stresses the sovereignty of grace, the incapacity of the creature, and the miraculous history whereby grace grants what the creature lacks for the sake of love and freedom. This pattern appears again and again in the Church Dogmatics [of Barth]. The church, the inspiration of scripture, faith, and all other creaturely realities in their relationship to god are always understood as events. They are not self-initiating and self-sustaining. They are not grounded in a neutral, ahistorical, or ontological relationship to God independent of the event of grace. Nor are they actualizations of certain ontologically given creaturely capacities. Rather, they have not only their being but also their possibility only as they are continually established anew according to the divine good pleasure. They have their being only in act--in the act of God which elicits from the creature the otherwise impossible act of free response. God is thus the Lord--not only of the mysterious event which constitutes the divine being, but also of the mysterious event which constitutes our being in relation to God.

This point may be drawn to a close with a simple but telling example. Barth's actualistic mode of thought enables him to explain why it is a mistake to reverse the biblical dictum that "God is love." (1 John 4:8, 16) so that instead it would say "Love is God" as though God could be equated with an abstract concept of love in general. As Barth carefully shows on exegetical grounds, "God is love" is a concise way of describing God's activity. It means that "God acts in a loving way." The statement cannot be reversed, because "God" refers to an acting subject, and "love" to the quality of God's activity. (Or more precisely, it could be reversed only one were to take this sense into account.) This example illustrates how Barth wants his actualistic sensibility to arise from and point back to scripture. The actualism is considered valid only insofar as it can illuminate scripture patters of thought (I/2, 374; II/1, 275, IV/2, 756)

George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 30-32 (emphasis added).

Occasionalism is a related concept to actualism. Occasionalism, as described by the Protestant ethicist James M. Gustafson, is "a view of moral action that emphasizes the uniqueness of each moment of serious moral choice in contrast to a view that emphasizes the persistent, perduring order of moral life and the continuities of human experience." In the context of morality, occasionalism results in a subjective morality, where "the moral life is without the props of principles of natural law, which have provided a basis for great objective certitude and for moral absolutes universally valid across time to all who share a common human nature." Gustafson, Protestant and Roman Catholic Ethics: Prospects for Rapprochement (Chicago: University of Chichago Press, 1978), 71, 72 (quoted in Grabill, 204-05, n. 17.)

The problem with Barth's actualism and occasionalism is that it results in a lack of balance in his thought, a problem resulting from his overemphasis of act, and an underemphasis of being. There is a decided overemphasis of freedom and sovereignty of God, and an underemphasis of law and reason. It is the doctrine of a man who focuses on trees, and so is blind to the beauties of the forest; who focuses on the notes, and so fails to hear the song; who reads specific judgments, but is unable to distill therefrom the rule or law; it is the limitation of a child who mouths words using phonics, but misses the thought in the sentence, the paragraph, or the book. To such a man, God's relationship with creation and with man is, as it were, a series of discrete points instead of a continuum.

Perhaps the best analogy for understanding Barth and for revealing the defect of his actualism and occasionalism and the cul de sac to which they lead is to compare his thought to music. Under Barth's actualism and occasionalism, our relationship with God is one of infinite independent notes, each one free and sovereign. And yet there is no melody, there is no underlying music that we may discern. (Any melody suggests a self-limiting plan, an ordering of notes following a motif, phrase, or theme as part of a greater melody, which is not consonant with Barth's emphasis on freedom and sovereignty of God.) So our relationship with God is a series of ultimately arbitrary and discrete notes: events, acts, occasions, each one independent and not part of a greater whole. It is as if Barth advances a theory of morality which is analogous to the chance music of John Cage--the throw of dice, and not any plan, determines the next note. There is no relationship, no greater melody, that ties one note to the other.

Ultimately, Barth's overemphasis on act over being, on freedom and sovereignty over law, leads to a moral deafness. One becomes deaf to the whole moral song when one insists that our relationship with God is not a melodious relationship, where there are not only discrete or arbitrary notes, but there also is an overarching melody, a complex and orderly panoply of motif, phrases, and themes in a unified whole. For Barth, God, and our relationship with God and his relationship with us, is a series of notes, and not one of melody. And where there is no overarching melody, there is no rule or law to be found; where there is no rule or law, there can be no discernible melody. For Barth's theological tin ear, the statement "God is Law Itself," as found in the Mirror of Saxons, would be jarring, when, in fact, for the trained ear, it is nothing but the most beautiful of melodies.

Indeed, in the moral life of man there is an underlying dual melody. There is a biphony in the moral song that God plays out in his creation naturally and in his redemption of that world in Christ supernaturally. Barth could not, would not hear it. That underlying melody is the Eternal Law. Played out in our world, and in the inner ear of our heart, this underlying melody is heard in the voice of the Natural Law. Played out in revelation, and in God's Word, the underlying melody is heard in the Divine Law. This dual melody is composed by God himself in the act of Creation and the act of Revelation. It is through this lovely melody that God woos us. It is through this melody by which God, as a man might his wife, beckons us to dance with him. It is in the harmonies and rhythm of this melody that we dance with God in the pas de deux that is the moral life. A dance that is ever and eternally in step with the dual strains of the Natural Law and Divine Law, which together harmonize into the one eternal and echanting melody of the Eternal Law.

Lex Aeterna: In Church, Scripture, and the Pagan

WHEN HE STATED in his compilation of the Saxon laws that "God is himself law" (see prior post), Eike von Repgow was referring to the notion of Eternal Law. The Eternal Law is the belief that God, the Creator and Ruler of the Universe, has a master plan or ratio that is found in His Creation and is enforced in His Providence. The existence of the Eternal Law is part of that assurance that there is a Reason behind God's Creation and its continued sustaining through His Providence. This plan or ratio goes beyond the material world. It includes the rational creation, and in particular mankind, for whom God has great solicitude. This solicitude, this love that God has for mankind, extends itself, in what has been called the "scandal of particularity," to reach each man and every woman, even every sparrow's fall. It is the firm hope that human life, my and my loved ones' lives, my neighbor's life, even my enemy's life, by God's design, has a purpose or end. Life is not, as Macbeth would have it,

. . . but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon a stage,
And then is heard no more.

It is not, a

. . . tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

(Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, sc. v.)

Embracing the reality of the Eternal Law encompasses a rejection of metaphysical pessimism. The doctrine insists that there is a purpose, plan, archetype, or design under which Creation and Providence are governed. This is what is called the Eternal Law.

We must start with this notion of the Eternal Law to understand the classical and traditional doctrine of the Natural Law, in both its Graeco-Roman and Christian roots. The notion of an Eternal Law is a truth that modernly has been disbelieved, discarded, and forgotten, and it must be relearned. In his book Creative Fidelity, the Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel speaks of the duty of the believer to become aware of the non-believer that is within him. This is also true with respect to our life in common. We have a duty to try to recognize where our society disbelieves, and where it ambles without guidance in the sloughs of practical atheism. Both individually and as a civil society, we are to have the same attitude as the man in the Gospels: Credo, Domine; adjuva incredulitatem meam! "Lord, I believe, help Thou my unbelief!" (Mark 9:24). This should be our approach, our earnest prayer, in engaging with the doctrine of Eternal Law. For many--to accept it in its full implications--it will require a conversion of the mind and the heart.

In Article 1 to Question 91 of the first part of the second part (Prima Secundae Partis) of his Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas asks whether there is an Eternal Law, a question he answers affirmatively. In answering the question he has posed, St. Thomas refers back to his definition of law as a "dictate of practical reason emanating from the ruler who governs a perfect community." ST IaIIae Q. 91, art.1, resp.; see also ST IaIIae Q. 90, art.4, resp. If God's existence and role as Creator and divine Provider are granted (and Thomas had treated those matters in a prior part of his Summa), St. Thomas observes that it follows, "the whole community of the universe is governed by Divine Reason." This governance by God "has the nature of a law," and since God's Reason is eternal, it is evident that this law must likewise be eternal. ST IaIIae Q. 91, art.1, resp. (As an aside, it may be observed that the Declaration of Independence, invokes a "firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence," which implicitly invokes the notion of an Eternal Law. So it is we that ought to look incredulously at the professorate of our law schools mentioned in our earlier post.)

In trying to understand the Eternal Law, however, man suffers from an intrinsic limitation. We have no direct knowledge of the Eternal Law. It is not seen in written form like a human statute; it is not announced in the public square; it is not obviously enforced by a league of visible policemen and judges. There are no angels handing out tickets or pursuing indictments. But this is not a cause for despair, nor, as the skeptics would have it, a matter for ridicule (one thinks of Jeremy Bentham in this regard). For the believer, it is a truth revealed in Scripture and propounded by the Teaching Church that there is an Eternal Law. It is a truth that is graspable through reason, though through a glass darkly. Therefore, it is a belief that may be found among the best of the pagans. It is a belief which may be shared with men and women of good will.

In Dignitatis Humanae (No. 3), for example, the Second Vatican Council points out that the

supreme rule of life is the divine law itself, the eternal, objective and universal law by which God out of his wisdom and love arranges, directs and governs the whole world and the paths of the human community. God has enabled man to share in this divine law, and hence man is able under the gentle guidance of God's providence increasingly to recognize the unchanging truth.

The Church's teaching rests soundly upon Scripture and Tradition, in particular, St. Augustine's and St. Thomas's classic teaching of the Eternal Law.

In his 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor, Pope John Paul II quoted this specific part of Dignitatis Humanae, and then commented (Nos. 43-44):

The Council refers back to the classic teaching on God's eternal law. Saint Augustine defines this as "the reason or the will of God, who commands us to respect the natural order and forbids us to disturb it." Saint Thomas identifies it with "the type of the divine wisdom as moving all things to their due end." And God's wisdom is providence, a love which cares. God himself loves and cares, in the most literal and basic sense, for all creation (cf. Wis 7:22; 8:11). But God provides for man differently from the way in which he provides for beings which are not persons. He cares for man not "from without," through the laws of physical nature, but "from within," through reason, which, by its natural knowledge of God's eternal law, is consequently able to show man the right direction to take in his free actions. In this way God calls man to participate in his own providence, since he desires to guide the world--not only the world of nature but also the world of human persons--through man himself, through man's reasonable and responsible care. The natural law enters here as the human expression of God's eternal law. Saint Thomas writes: "Among all others, the rational creature is subject to divine providence in the most excellent way, insofar as it partakes of a share of providence, being provident both for itself and for others. Thus it has a share of the Eternal Reason, whereby it has a natural inclination to its proper act and end. This participation of the eternal law in the rational creature is called natural law."

The Church has often made reference to the Thomistic doctrine of natural law, including it in her own teaching on morality. Thus my Venerable Predecessor Leo XIII emphasized the essential subordination of reason and human law to the Wisdom of God and to his law. After stating that "the natural law is written and engraved in the heart of each and every man, since it is none other than human reason itself which commands us to do good and counsels us not to sin," Leo XIII appealed to the "higher reason" of the divine Lawgiver: "But this prescription of human reason could not have the force of law unless it were the voice and the interpreter of some higher reason to which our spirit and our freedom must be subject." Indeed, the force of law consists in its authority to impose duties, to confer rights and to sanction certain behaviour: "Now all of this, clearly, could not exist in man if, as his own supreme legislator, he gave himself the rule of his own actions." And he concluded: "It follows that the natural law is itself the eternal law, implanted in beings endowed with reason, and inclining them towards their right action and end, it is none other than the eternal reason of the Creator and Ruler of the universe."

(Pope John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, Nos. 43-44 (citations omitted) (The encylical quoted by John Paul II is Leo XIII's Libertas Praestantissimum of June 20, 1888)).

The Scriptural references to the Eternal Law are legion. It is usually referred to under the personification of Divine Wisdom. Suffice us to point out Proverbs 8:15-16, and Proverbs 8:23-36.

By me kings reign, and lawgivers decree just things,
By me princes rule, and the mighty decree justice
I was set up from eternity, and of old before the earth was made.
The depths were not as yet, and I was already conceived. neither had the fountains of waters as yet sprung out:
The mountains with their huge bulk had not as yet been established: before the hills I was brought forth:
He had not yet made the earth, nor the rivers, nor the poles of
the world.
When he prepared the heavens, I was present: when with a certain law
and compass he enclosed the depths:
When he established the sky above, and poised the fountains of waters:
When he compassed the sea with its bounds, and set a law to the waters that they should not pass their limits:
When he balanced the foundations of the earth; I was with him forming all things: and was delighted every day, playing before him at all times;
Playing in the world: and my delights were to be with the children of men.
Now therefore, ye children, hear me: Blessed are they that keep my ways.
Hear instruction and be wise, and refuse it not.
Blessed is the man that heareth me, and that watcheth daily at my
gates, and waiteth at the posts of my doors.
He that shall find me, shall find life, and shall have salvation from the Lord:
But he that shall sin against me, shall hurt his own soul.
All that hate me love death.

The existence of an Eternal Law is not only a religious or revealed truth. There is a basis in reason for believing in the Eternal Law, and consequently one can find an understanding of the Eternal Law in the leading lights of Greece and Rome, such as the philosopher Plato or the Roman statesman Cicero. For example, in writing his book on the Natural Law, the English Protestant divine Nathanael Culverwell (1619-1651), generally associated with the Cambridge Platonists, relied on the Jesuit Francisco Suárez and the Dominican Thomas Aquinas. But he also accessed the writings of the pagans Plato and Cicero to show how even the pagans had a notion of a Law above all law, a law that governed the cosmos, and that was the archetype or model, of what human laws should be. Aggregating references to Plato's dialogues, including Cratylus and Laws, and Plotinus's Enneads , Culverwell summarizes:

This the Platonists would call ἰδέαντωννόμων [the ideal of laws], and would willingly heap such honourable titles as these upon it, ὁνόμοςἀρχηγὸς, πρωτουργὸς, αὐτοδίκαιος, αὐτόκαλος, αὐτοάγαθος, ὁὄντωςνόμος, ὁνόμοςσπερματικός [the archetypal law, primary, intrinsically just, beautiful and good, the essential law, the seminal law]. And the greatest happinesse the other Lawes can arrive unto, is this, that they be Νόμοιδουλεύοντες, καὶὑπηρετουντες, ministring and subservient Lawes; waiting upon this their Royal Law. Σκιαὶνόμων; Or as they would choose to stile them, Νομοειδεις, some shadows & appearances of this bright and glorious Law, or at the best, they would be esteemed by them but Νόμοιἔκγονοι, the noble off-spring and progeny of Lawes; blessing this womb that bare them, and this breast that gave them suck.

Culverwell also draws from Cicero's book De Legibus II.4.8 to show that this notion was carried over and adopted by the Romans. As he freely translated it:

Wise men did ever look upon a Law, not as on a spark struck from human intellectuals, not blown up or kindled with popular breath, but they thought it an eternal light shining from God himself irradiating, guiding, and ruling the whole Universe; most sweetly and powerfully discovering what wayes were to be chosen, and what to be refused. And the minde of God himself is the centre of Lawes, from which they were drawn, and into which they must return.

(NathanielCulverwell, An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature (Robert A. Greene and Hugh MacCallum, eds.) (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 36-37.)

The notion of the Eternal Law is thus part of our cultural and religious heritage. In our next post, we will address in a little greater detail St. Thomas Aquinas's teachings about the Eternal Law, a teaching which the Church has adopted as her own.

Lex Aeterna: God is Law

IN A STRIKING PHRASE, The Mirror of the Saxons, a collection of customary laws compiled by Eike von Repgow (1180-1235), states "God is himself law, and therefore law is dear to him." (quoted in Harold J. Berman, Faith and Order: The Reconciliation of Law and Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2000), 292.) Modernly, we are accustomed to hearing that God is Justice, and God is Mercy, and God is Love. Our ear is attuned to those truths, and they seem, though they never ought to be, almost commonplace. But the phrase "God himself is Law" is jarring to the modern ear. It seems jarring from both a religious and a secular perspective. That it is jarring is a sign of two things. First, it is probably reflective of a modern religious disdain for "Law" based upon misunderstanding of both both "Law" and "Grace" in the divine economy of salvation; it betrays, unfortunately, a fundamental misunderstanding, largely inherited from Protestant theology, between the aera sub lege and the aera sub gratia, the dispensation before Christ and after Christ. (In fact, Law and Grace, like Nature and Grace, or Reason and Faith, do not contradict each other. The natural law was in force before Christ and after Christ.) Second, and more pertinent to this blog which is dedicated to the Natural Law, the jarring is a sign of how far our political and legal institutions have strayed from their traditional moorings in the Natural Law.

As secularism has marched incessantly forward, like a Juggernaut destroying all the inherited cultural capital, both Christian and Graeco-Roman, in its path the world has become, in Max Weber's phrase, progressively "disenchanted." As a result, our civil, political, and legal institutions have become increasingly emancipated from God to such a degree that we act as practical atheists.

For example, as we understand it today, the notion of the Rule of Law is purposefully crafted to exclude mention of God, and so is a notion merely procedural, purely secular. While, as a legal principle, it may have significant value, it nevertheless suffers from obvious limitations. When push comes to shove, it offers but a superficial bulwark against tyranny. (As an example of its limited value, the Rule of Law cannot be used to criticise Roe v. Wade;indeed, the Rule of Law arguably demands its continued enforcement.) Many commentators have noted the same problem with the modern notion of "Human Rights."

Disassociating God from Law, like disassociating God from Ethics, has caused our scholars to run into intellectual cul-de-sacs. Scholars have a hard time answering why there ought to be a "Rule of Law," and why there is such a thing as "Human Rights," and why these ought to have a universal value.

God and the Eternal Law are ostracized from our public and even private schools, even those with an originally religious foundation. Mention that "God himself is Law" to any among the professorate at Harvard (of Puritan foundation) or Yale (Congregationalist) law schools, and you will likely draw a blank, quizzical, or perhaps disdainful look. That would not have been true at their founding. This frequently leads to an impossible quandary, the effects of which are a cacophony of ethical discussion without hope of resolution or common ground, absurdities advanced as serious thought, or just plain nihilism and despair. (See, e.g., Law's Quandary by Stephen D. Smith, and After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre.)

To paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, when men don't believe in an Eternal Law, the result is not that they believe in no law, but that they will believe in every kind of law (including no law).

With that introduction, our next posts will address the issue of what the Eternal Law is, and how it may be known.