Assorted Prose (34 page)

(Ten points for each imaginary kingdom identified by work and author, with a bonus ten for pouncing on “Zembla,” still warm from last year’s Nabokov novel.)

While Professor Levin’s allusiveness is occasionally trivial
¹
and his prose overburnished,
²
he compresses worlds of reading into virtual epigrams
³
and on every page chisels some dimly felt facet of literature into the brilliance of exact expression.
⁴
Levin’s criticism perhaps marks the
highest reach criticism can attain while remaining academic. As a theorist, he is tame and fussy. As a reader, he is unsurpassably discriminating, patient, and sympathetic. Although the introductory and epilogic matter concerned with reality and romance, realism and anti-realism never quite grips the great urgencies of death and sex that make unreality, as it were, so real, the heart of the book, the essays on the five classic French novelists, is solidly alive. The five chapters, in retrospect, each seem empathetically tinted with the qualities of the author discussed: the chapter on Stendhal rather easy and improvised, the one on Flaubert slightly slow and laborious, the one on Proust meandering and ornate, the ones on Balzac and Zola miniature engines of constructive energy. I was struck especially by the enthusiasm with which Levin synopsizes and appraises the accomplishment of these last two authors, whose uniformly bound
oeuvres
certainly need a vigorous dusting. The classics stand in need of constant inventory; as an inventory, and as an incitement to reread,
The Gates of Horn
is very valuable.

The title comes from Homer: “Two gates for ghostly dreams there are: one gateway / of honest horn, and one of ivory.” Through the gates of ivory pass fantasies and illusions; through the gates of horn pass dreams that “may be borne out,” that is, realistic dreams. Levin’s presiding assertion, “realism presupposes an idealism to be corrected,” aligns the masterpieces of the novel behind the premier exemplar,
Don Quixote
, and relates them, in France, more or less intimately to the many political disillusions between the Revolution and the First World War. By way of emphasis, a chronology at the back of the book intermingles events like “Third Republic proclaimed, after defeat of Napoleon III in Franco-Prussian War” (1870) with events like “Proust experiences his first asthmatic attack” (1880). Such an approach has more in it of honest horn than of ivory, although as horn it is beautifully polished and painstakingly wrought. If the novel is in essence realistic, and if “the realistic movement and the bourgeois lifestyle” are linked in a necessary “cohabitation,” then indeed the novel may be as dead as the epic and the romance, for at least in the West social entropy has melted away the aristocrat and the peasant whose flanking contrast gave the term
bourgeois
pungency and shape. M. Homais reigns unchallenged; social distinctions no longer exist, only degrees of wealth and poverty. There does remain, revealed all the more sharply in the present lull that has settled over Western society, the great aboriginal distinction between inner and outer, between
anima
and
res
; and Professor Levin’s survey, which like anything monumental has a touch of the tombstone, would seem to leave us—to his regret—with nowhere to turn but toward the gate of ivory. Prose narrative needs to refresh itself at the springs of myth and dream. Is this to be deplored? The contemporary attempts to shake off the heavy spell of realism, however seemingly formless and irresponsible, are a worthy phase of man’s attempt to educate himself through literature.

 
FAITH IN SEARCH OF UNDERSTANDING

A
NSELM:
Fides Quaerens Intellectum
, by Karl Barth, translated from the German by Ian W. Robertson. 173 pp. World, 1962.

“There is no way from us to God—not even a
via negativa
—not even a
via dialectica
nor
paradoxa
. The god who stood at the end of some human way … would not be God.”
^*
This assertion, which would seem to discourage all theology, is by Karl Barth, the most prominent, prolific, and (it seems to me) persuasive of twentieth-century theologians. His theology has two faces—the No and the Yes. The No, which first resounded in 1919, when the original edition of Barth’s impassioned commentary on Romans was published, is addressed to all that is naturalistic, humanistic, demythologized, and merely ethical in the Christianity that German Protestantism had inherited from the nineteenth century. The liberal churches, as Barth saw them, were dedicated to “the god to whom in our pride and despair we have erected the tower of Babel; to the great personal or impersonal, mystical, philosophical, or naive Background and Patron Saint of our human righteousness, morality, state, civilization, or religion.… This god is really an unrighteous god, and it is high time for us to declare ourselves thoroughgoing doubters, skeptics, scoffers, and atheists in regard to him.” The real God, the God men do not invent, is
totaliter aliter
—Wholly Other. We cannot reach Him; only
He can reach us. This He has done as the Christ of Biblical revelation, and the Yes of Barth’s theology is the reaffirmation, sometimes in radically original terms (for instance, his virtually antinomian doctrine of all-inclusive Grace),
^†
of the traditional Christian message. As a critical theologian, Barth ranks with Kierkegaard; as a constructive one, with Aquinas and Calvin. His elaboration of the Yes may be dated from 1932, when he began to publish the huge series of
Church Dogmatics
, which, after twelve volumes totalling nearly seven thousand pages, still engages him.

Between, as it were, the No and the Yes, Barth published, in 1931, a small book,
Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum
, devoted to a detailed explication of the so-called “ontological” proof of God’s existence definitely formulated by St. Anselm (1033–1109) in his treatise the
Proslogion
. Not until 1958 was it reprinted in German, and not until recently was it published in this country. Barth, in introducing the second German edition, expresses “sorrow and surprise” that “this book, on which at the time I expended special care and devotion, has remained until now in its first edition and has long been out of print.” No doubt the Nazi interregnum is partly to blame for this neglect, but this essay on Anselm is, even for a piece of theology, uncommonly tedious and difficult, replete with untranslated passages of Latin, English words like “ontic,” “noetic,” and “aseity,” and non-stop sentences of granitic opacity. Yet it is, for the author, a pivotal work; in his preface Barth writes, “In this book on Anselm I am working with a vital key, if not the key, to an understanding of that whole process of thought that has impressed me more and more … as the only one proper to theology.”

This is surprising, because Barth’s theology is intrinsically scornful of proofs and the kind of metaphysics that admits them. “Metaphysical absolutes,” he has written, “are an abomination unto the Lord and abolished in Christ.” In Volume II, Book 1, of
Church Dogmatics
he goes to some lengths to unmask the Catholic doctrine of
analogia entis
(the analogy of being, which argues toward the existence of God from the reality of created beings) as disguised natural theology, and as such non-Biblical, unrevealed, and worse than worthless. Even less stringent varieties of Christian thought have learned to do without proofs. The Very Reverend Walter Robert Matthews, Dean of St. Paul’s, concludes
his discussion of the traditional proofs in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
with the mild claim that “in spite of their failure as demonstrative arguments they have great value as indicating lines of thought, suggested by experience, which tend to substantiate the Theistic theory.” Certainly the traditional proofs, in the light of modern science, are no more than suggestive. The cosmological argument, which survived the shift from the Ptolemaic to the Newtonian cosmos, is hopelessly strained between the unimaginable macrocosm of super-stellar astronomy and the inscrutable microcosm of particle physics. And the teleological argument (i.e., many things—e.g., the human eye—are intricately designed for purposive ends;
ergo
, a directing Intelligence exists) was administered a mortal blow when Darwin demonstrated how the organic world, for all its seemingly engineered complexity, might be a self-winnowing chaos. Anselm’s proof, unlike these, makes no appeal to the natural world; with peculiar elegance it sidesteps external phenomena entirely. It gives God a name, and seeks to demonstrate that the name excludes the possibility of non-existence.

Anselm’s proof, as customarily expressed, is: “Something beyond which it is impossible to conceive anything greater” must exist in reality as well as in the mind, for if it existed only in the mind, it would not be “something beyond which it is impossible to conceive anything greater.” The customary criticism, expressed by the Benedictine monk Gaunilo in Anselm’s lifetime and since then by many others, including Aquinas and Kant, is that existence is not a quality but the precondition of all qualities. Gaunilo applied to the proof the
reductio ad absurdum
of the “perfect island,” which, though undiscovered in a far-off sea, must, by Anselm’s principle, exist because of its supposed perfection. Anselm’s rebuttal was that God is conceived of as greater absolutely rather than as the greatest of a class of objects; though in all other instances essence and existence are separable, and a being may be conceived of as not existing, this is not possible in the single case of God. This reasoning was to be echoed by Descartes, one of the several post-medieval thinkers—Leibniz and Hegel are others—who have found in the ontological argument something more than an absurd transposition of fact and fancy. Indeed, the ontological argument is a kind of logical prism that, depending on how it is tipped, looks shallow as a mirror or profound as a well.

Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum
begins with Barth’s analysis of
how Anselm conceived of theology and what, specifically, he meant by “prove.” The terms “
probare
” and “
probatio
” were first used, in connection with Anselm’s proof in
Proslogion
, by Gaunilo in his counter-work
Liber pro Insipiente
(“Book on Behalf of the Fool”). Though Anselm accepted these terms and employed them in his refutation,
Contra Gaunilonem
, his initial description of what he is doing is not
probare
but
intelligere
. To Anselm, as Barth reads him, theology is the attempt to understand what has already been given by faith; proof, far from being the aim of this attempt, is the rather incidental “polemical-apologetic result of
intelligere
.” In establishing this precedence—understanding subsumed under faith, and proof under understanding—Barth contradicts the common impression of theology as the justification
a nihilo
of the articles of faith. This, he says in a footnote, “would be like trying to support Mount Olympus with pegs and ropes.” His conception of theology’s role may strike the non-Christian as scandalously modest: “The 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.” While the words are Barth’s, ample footnotes root them to Anselm; Barth’s exposition follows the Latin so closely that even an apparently spontaneous metaphor, “bats and owls squabbling with eagles about the reality of the beams of the midday sun,” turns out to be a translation of “
vespertiliones et noctuae non nisi in nocte caelum videntes de meridianis solis radiis disceptent contra aquilas
.”

The unbeliever, the bat or owl blind to the sun, the “fool [
insipiens
] who has said in his heart, ‘There is no God,’ ” may well question the relevance to him of this theology, this utterly secure exploration—Barth observes a “characteristic absence of crisis in Anselm’s theologizing”—of the terrain enclosed between the subjective
credo
of personal belief and the objective Credo of the Church. In a sense, to the faithless theology can have no relevance. Its announced purpose is “to give the faithful joy in believing by a demonstration of the
ratio
of their faith.” Anselm writes, “
Credo ut intelligam
” (“I believe in order to understand”). And Barth insists that Anselm insists on the impossibility of the
intelligere
shifting itself to the alien ground of
non credo
. Yet Anselm, as aware as
any medieval Christian of heathens and heretics, not to mention contentious Benedictine monks, is distinguished by an exceptional polemical mildness. “Perhaps Anselm did not know any other way of speaking of the Christian
Credo
except by addressing the sinner as one who has not sinned, the non-Christian as a Christian, the unbeliever as believer, on the basis of the great ‘as if’ which is really not an ‘as if’ at all, but which at all times has been the final and decisive means whereby the believer could speak to the unbeliever.”