Karl Barth was bom in Basle in 1886, the descendant of a long line of Swiss Protestant pastors and burghers, who included in their ranks Jacob Burckhardt, the historian of the Italian Renaissance. His family were patricians and devotees of music and the arts, but they also had a simple devotion to Jesus. In the biography of Barth written, on the basis of his autobiographical essays and letters, by his last academic assistant, Eberhard Busch, we hear that Barth’s earliest theological formation came from religious nursery-rhymes in the Basle dialect. His subsequent theological pilgrimage can be seen as a flight from, and then return to, the religious assurance of these children’s songs - albeit in an infinitely more sophisticated manner. As he himself wrote, these songs

There has been a resurgence of interest in Karl Barth’s work over the last decade in both this country and the States. It has been an interest paralleling a growing recognition that ‘postmodemity’ best characterizes (if such an chameleon noun can characterize anything) our cultural situation. It is no surprise, then, to find studies of Karl Barth’s work which interpret him as a deconstructionist avant la lettre and interpret his Weimar culture as “a first postmodemity”.But, in the main, what is understood by ‘postmodernism’ and ‘postmodemity’ in these studies is left inadequately defined. Therefore, there is a certain lack of clarity about why it is that Karl Barth’s theology resonates with contemporary culture. Furthermore, the majority of studies comparing Barth’s work with postmodern thinking concentrate upon his early, dialectical theology, in particular his metaphor of ‘crisis’ in the second edition of his Epistle to the Romans. In this essay, then, I wish to attempt two things. First, to try and provide a clarity concerning Barth’s relatedness to postmodernism and establish the rationale for the interest in Barth’s work today. Secondly, to show that the profundity of the parallels between Barth’s work and postmodernism lies not in the similar use of the ‘crisis’ metaphor, but in respective approaches to the nature of discourse itself.

Read positively, postmodernism is concerned with liberation; a liberation from self-legitimating structures. Postmodern thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard problematize this legitimation. They ask, what or who authorizes the power certain discourses have to explain the world ?

Von Balthasar’s “On the Unfolding of the Musical Idea” contains one of his recurrent stories: the grave suggestion that musical form expresses the beautiful, and therefore touches on the horizon of the divine. Von Balthasar later recalled Ehrenfels’ achievement. He says that the conception of form which undergirds Aristotelian and scholastic ontology, as a “totality of parts” which “transcends its members as parts”,

The first step in the reappraisal of die ontological difference is the recovery of the essentia. As von Balthasar says in reference to Anselm, the theological act needs the grip hold of the philosophical intuition of essences. The realistic phenomenologists showed that this can be achieved, and that, not as a dogmatic exercise, but as a living philosophical enterprise. Any exit into a static essentialism is blocked by Ehrenfels’ starting place in the study of music. The melodic gestalt flows out of a movement in time. Przywara hears the ‘essence’ as an interplay of phonic forces, interweaving in their diverse speeds and velocities. Von Balthasar takes beautiful form as the analogy for the Christology of The Glory. He finds in the Incarnation a design of horizontal and vertical thrusts. He says,

Dom Illtyd Trethowan, monk of Downside, died on October 30, 1993. One of his last publications was a recent review in New Blaclfriars, but his writings, and his efforts to make available works of theology and philosophy by others, go back a very long way. His first article appeared in The Downside Review in 1935 (he subsequently came to be Editor of The Downside Review).His first book, Certainty, Philosophical and Theological, appeared in 1948. Before then he translated Eugène Masure’s seminal study Sacrifice du Chef (1944), and, as early as 1940 (together with Frank Sheed) he translated Etienne Gilson’s La Philosophic de Saint Bonaventure. Between 1948 and the time of his death he published 110 articles, plus numerous book reviews. He also produced seven substantial books, an edition of the writings of Walter Hilton, and several translations of important authors not much known in the English-speaking world—most notably, Maurice Blondel, Louis Lavelle, and Louis Bouyer.

Dom Illtyd was not a monk who travelled to teach and spend lots of time outside his monastery. In 1969 he lectured for one semester in the U.S.A. (at Brown University in Rhode Island), but he was otherwise a fixture at Downside from the day that he joined the community there. Yet simply in terms of pages printed, his published works and translations clearly place him in the forefront of twentieth century British Catholics writing on religion and trying to make available the writings on religion of others.