ABSTRACT
Having allayed Balthasar’s suspicion that Barth does not have a coherent concept of analogy in general, the second part of the book then challenges his interpretation of Barth’s theology of beauty by demonstrating that Barth not only recovers theological beauty but also develops an analogia pulchritudinis in his work: throughout his career, he intentionally develops an analogy between theological beauty and ecclesial beauty and he also consistently acknowledges that the beauty of the world extra muros ecclesiae may bear witness to God. This chapter begins by arguing that Barth already has three rudiments of an analogia pulchritudinis in the early stages of his academic career (1919–1940). Firstly, in this period Barth develops a rudimentary analogy of theological and ecclesial beauty. His academic appointment to Roman Catholic Münster in 1926 triggered a serious encounter with medieval allusions to beauty for the first time. He recognised that this concept had the potential to dissociate his dogmatics from fatalistic Reformed concepts of effectual call, to vindicate it against charges of existential irrelevance and to ground a theological method that was profoundly autobiographical. So he made a rudimentary appropriation of it in Church Dogmatics I/2 (1938) by acknowledging that the object of theology has beauty, that various forms of Christian witness (Scripture, preaching and the content of theology) must therefore have a corresponding form of beauty, and that theology is exceptionally beautiful and pleasurable work. At this stage, however, these claims remained diffuse and concessive and lacked a theoretical basis. Secondly, parallel to this development, Barth also developed a potential conceptual basis for his analogy of theological and ecclesial beauty in the unified and distinct form of simplicity and multiplicity or unity and distinction of his doctrine of God and his belief that theology veils and unveils its subject matter by speaking definitely and yet modestly about it. Thirdly, from as early as The Christian’s Place in Society (1919), Barth recognised that natural revelation implied that even natural and artistic beauty and human understandings of beauty could bear witness to God.
