I sit in my study at home, and the combination of some bargains on AbeBooks and the digital world means that I don’t spend hours biking from one library to another, waiting for books to “come up”, standing by the photocopier etc etc. The new system is convenient, cost-effective and I love it. But I do sometimes wonder about its effect on the general world of the library. My early academic career was based in the bricks-and-mortar library. It was where I got my books, but it was also where I got many of my friends and the people to talk to about my (and their) work. I didn’t need wellbeing classes (I have to confess that the phrase “wellbeing” has precisely the opposite effect on me!). I had the day-to-day support network of the library. (It wasn’t all quite so virtuous, but that is another story, for when I retire, folks.)
There is also what it does to the staff and the whole infrastructure of the library. I rather dread that the library will become the “treasure house” of some precious, rare books – while everything else is done “off-site” or “online”. And I dread that there will be whole cohorts of staff who, instead of doing the admittedly tough job (but with human contact) of fetching books for readers, and of reshelving, are in the bowels of the basements doing wall-to-wall scanning.
—Mary Beard, A Don's Life
Prof. Beard writes about "scan and deliver" services for physical books otherwise inaccessible due to restrictions necessitated by the pandemic. Such services have become ubiquitous and many will probably survive the return to "normal" (whatever that word may come to mean). She fears that "there will never again be the kind of 'library culture' that I grew up with.
I believe I understand and can sympathize with many of Prof. Beard's fears. I'm a couple of years older than she, and given different retirement rules in the U.S., I'm still on the job for another academic year as a University Librarian of a small, regional, Catholic university of no particular consequence, that specializes in pre-professional and professional programs and is only slightly similar to Cambridge. I was educated in American liberal arts colleges and graduate schools in Classics and the History of Christianity, doubtless not to the level of Oxbridge scholarship, but with just enough familiarity to have participated in a library culture similar to what Prof. Beard remembers when I was in Princeton.
I've been in librarianship since professionally since 1985. In 1981 my first library staff job was typing catalogue cards at the Institute for Advanced Study Historical Studies Library. I have witnessed the disruptions of library services and scholarship in the ensuing decades, from the first generation of computerized catalogues and integrated library services to contemporary discovery and AI services.
I'm not about to claim that the "library culture" of which Prof. Beard so capably writes was neither so supportive, nor so good as it really was. (In my case, at least.) The library and information technologies of the time really did inadvertently foster a sense of collegiality and supportive community spirit. Those technologies—printed books, card catalogues, seminar rooms near relevant collections, in-person services with library staff of all kinds—enabled me to finish papers and degrees and often enjoy the process. Although it has become fashionable to claim that such technologies were based on the reality of "print scarcity" (such as: only one reader per book per time), it can be said equally that such technologies fostered collegiality, sharing, and personal contact on a day-to-day basis. How many times did a professor recommend a book which he or she had already checked out, often sitting adjacent? —so that when I had searched for the book and learned that it was in circulation, I had to ask him or her for it? Inconvenient? certainly. Personal contact? Definitely —even when personal contact was not always pleasant.
My only point is that present and future digital library technologies could (or perhaps do) foster collegiality, personal community, and supportive community in different manners from the past.
For example, in the 1990s I was working up a dissertation on the early works of an obscure Carolingian bishop. With present digital means, I might have learned that a German in Munich, an American in Toronto, and a professor down the road (in Trenton, N.J.) were working in different ways with the same author. Given the realities of the time, I learned about the last of those through our mutual acquaintance of a professor in Princeton. I learned about the second author when his presence at the Institute for Advanced Study facilitated an official invitation that he become a member of my dissertation committee. I learned about the first (the German in Munich) only after he had published a book that challenged some of my working assumptions. Digital technologies might have facilitated significant interaction with these scholars more quickly; the participation of all of us in digital networks might have given a chance for mutual discovery.
The library culture of the latter 20th century certainly was not always "virtuous" (Prof. Beard's term). There were some very real downsides. Much of the library work of the pre-digital eras was tedious and encouraged a mentality of slavish conformity to obscure and sometimes obstructive rules (both the formal: cataloguing; and the informal: we don't ever ask University Library X to supply anything via hand-written interlibrary loan requests on paper ALA forms, because we don't like them). At times, the former library culture formed a kind of dystopia utterly opaque to scholars and readers on the outside, but very much limiting their work in a manner of which they were unaware.
Libraries as cultures will continue to evolve, and not necessarily towards a dystopian future of cohorts of basement-dwelling, low-paid staff scurrying about the bowels of the treasure house. Neither heaven nor hell is likely.
Libraries are and will remain services, spaces, and resources—and online books, journals, and digital scholarship of all kinds will never be exactly obvious for everyone to find. The nature of learning is that its trails of evidence and citation are intricate and intersect in odd ways at unpredictable moments.
The "day-to-day support network of the library" will only disappear when humans are entirely removed. Perhaps that will happen in a distant someday, but not soon (despite administrators' and funders' concerns about productivity, cost, and impact—whatever those terms might mean).
Library users (readers, patrons) will continue to seek the level of support that they desire. (Some never wanted to interact with anyone else at all under any circumstances—the social loners or sociopathic misanthropes will always be with us.).
Those who really want support will, I truly believe, be able to find it from the same sources as always: peers, unexpected companions, acquaintances in other disciplines, unanticipated friends at a distance, and intelligent, informed, libraries oriented to both service and scholarship. Library readers (users, patrons) will cultivate the same good will and good humor from those staff who retrieve off-site materials, or who manage to locate or gain access to unsought but pertinent online resources.
Is outlook too sanguine or or sunny? I hope not. Libraries have been around a long, long time. I have had to explain to Provosts and Deans given to excessively short-term thinking that the temporal horizons of librarianship is decades if not centuries, and not only the next quarter or fiscal year. Matthew Battles (Library: An Unquiet History) reminds us that libraries, as centers of culture power, prestige, and legitimacy, have been targets for destruction from organized armies, terrorist organizations, and not-so-benign neglecters —as well as scheming academic administrators. Libraries have nevertheless survived, as have their users, and while the support networks they have fostered for scholars have sometimes (and tragically) gone into eclipse in evil times, they have re-emerged when times, technologies, and powers change.
Prof. Beard anticipates retirement from active faculty service, about the same time that I anticipate retirement from library leadership. It's hard to say good-bye and Godspeed without fearing decline, both personal, academic, disciplinary, and institutional. Without those good-byes, there can be no hello to another kind of work and life. I look forward to reading what Prof. Beard will write in the coming decades, from perspectives and prospects.
Thank you to Prof. Beard for consistently informative and provocative thinking over the decades. With more to come!
Recently I've have read in succession Philip Marsden's The Summer Isles: A Voyage of the Imagination, and Patrick Laurie's Native: Life in a Vanishing Landscape. The first narrates the writer's challenging voyage by sail northwards through the western coastal islands of Ireland and Scotland, from Dingle to Ullapool. The second narrates a year in the life of a young farmer determined to bring back older, ecologically respectful, sustainable farming methods to a small plot in Galloway, an often-neglected southwest corner of Scotland. Each in his way narrates a point of view from a chosen periphery to the urban, digital culture that pervades our times, and each questions not only the cultural sustainability of such centers (or centres!)
The tension between center/periphery is a theme in scholarship about the Late Antique period in the scholarship of Peter Brown. In that era, urban elites sought to define Christianity formally at the same time that locations and individuals on the Roman periphery —the Holy Man in the desert, the missioner in Ireland, the so-called Monophysite Christians who took Christian with them on the Silk Road towards the East; the relative seclusion of the Ethiopian Churches—that these "peripheral" figures and communities possessed the imaginative power that characterized the passing of the ancient heritages to later centuries. The rhetorical power of the elites at the centers—Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem—had to compete with the powerful figure in isolation, and the sense that at the periphery the future was taking shape and would come back to characterize the center.
One portion of that geographical periphery were islands past which Philip Marsden sailed; another portion was the Galloway where St. Ninian founded Whithorn before his death in ca. 432 CE. Though connected to mainland Great Britain, Galloway may have figured as Pen Rhionydd in the Arthurian tradition of the three thrones of Britain. According to A. P. Jennings in the Oxford Companion to Scottish History, the name Galloway may derive from a Gaelic phrase for "stranger-Gaidheil," a people with Gaelic and Scandinavian ancestry. Its peninsular location meant it remained removed from much of the turmoil of the Scottish Borderlands, but the people are brutally treated after the 1603 Union in the Covenanter rebellion and subsequent wars.
This sense of periphery figures in both books, but in different ways. In Marsden's book, every Irish geographical feature has a story in the ancient sagas and annals, sometimes remembered by the locals, sometimes forgotten. The Scottish ancient annals figured poorly through subsequent violent wars, and some of the "invented tradition" (in the phrase of Eric Hobsbawm, 1963), or more accurately re-invented traditions. Hobsbawm's distinction between "invented" and "genuine" traditions founders upon the fact that all traditions, genuine or not, are humanly created, unlike some kind of natural deposit, and that "reinventions" may seek to express a long-standing point of view even in the phrases of a later invention, such as a "nation." Galloway has surely felt itself on the periphery of Scotland (and England) as have the western Irish counties. Nevertheless, Laurie roots his narrative in the geographical features that have long characterized Gallovidian lives, a felt geography as vivid as that of Ireland.
The sense of periphery has a literary function similar in each book: it serves to invert a sense of value, a sense of historical perspective, the sense of what's important. Both authors are lament of the trends of depopulation and marginalization, as though Galloway or the Western Isles were to become merely some kind of touristic theme-park for wealthy urbanites who seek a rest from the stresses of London, Dublin, Brussels, Edinburgh, or elsewhere. The dignity of the people who continue, dwindle as their numbers do, to inhabit these areas—dignitas properly understood as distinctive rank and traditional claim rooted in place—give ample reason to resist the arrogance of the social planners and politicians who are utterly alienated from any sense of place at all. Indeed the kosmos is not the polis—cosmopolitan does not in fact absorb and co-opt all before it in a newly imperial manner. (Perhaps cosmopolitan national planners, central bankers, and craven politicians are the re-invented tradition of 19th-century global imperialists, with all the self-righteousness of the self-possessed.)
Like the ancient sagas and traditions, the ultimate force of both books simply says, I was here. This was here. This world was here, and this world could be again a home for dolphins, curlews, and saints. In the face of catastrophic climate change, can this land, this sea, these people endure?
Can studying the liberal arts be a "cultural jig?'
Rather, was the concept of "a liberal arts education" a sort of cultural jig, and might it become one again?
I realize those questions make no sense. I write here a bit of a ramble, a set of thoughts that are almost aphorisms for a project I'm working on. This is my first attempt really to get much of it down in writing. (I might say on paper, but I'm looking at a screen.). Of course this will be disorganized.
The "jig" in question is a practice and concept advanced by Matthew Crawford in his book The World Beyond Your Head: Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (2015). In carpentry, for example, "a jig is a device or procedure that guides a repeated action by constraining the environment in such as way as to make the action go smoothly, the same each time, without [the carpenter's] having to think about it." (p. 31) Jigs usually are found in a workshop; jigs can also be made on-site from materials at hand. Hence, "when a carpenter wants to cut a half-dozen boards to the same length, he is unlikely to measure each one, market it, and then carefully guide his saw along the line he has made on the board."(ibid.) Rather, the jig (in this case, a small length of scrap lumber) will guide the saw to cut at the correct length. The carpenter has to slide the saw along the edge of the carefully positioned jig, and the boards will be cut to the correct and uniform length.
A staircase jig ; image from Wikimedia by johnalden, CC Atribution-Share Alike 3.0
The point of a jig is that it stabilizes the worker's environment, limiting a range of free movement in exchange for lightening the burden of care for each action. A worker can undertake a sequence of actions in a uniform pattern without having to think through each action each time. "Jigging is something that expert practitioners do generally, if we allow that it is possible to jib one's environment 'informationally.'"(ibid.)
All kinds of workers use jigs: bartenders, short-order cooks, carpenters, crafters of all kinds. The mental work such a person must perform is reduced an externalized in the arrangements of physical space. David Kirsch writes in The Intelligent Use of Space that experts "constantly re-arrange items to make easy to 1. Track the task; 2. Figure out, remember, or notice the properties signaling what to do next; 3. Predict the effects of actions."(Crawford, p. 32-33) Experts are freed from haltingly thinking through every repetitive action, making things easier by "partially jigging or informationally structuring the environment as they go along." (Kirsch, nos. 1-2)
The expert mentally constrains some degrees of her freedom to keep a skilled activity on track, keeping her attention properly directed in her intersection of spaces and skills. Her space becomes an inhabited space, an extension of herself, and she achieves her purposes with a minimum expenditure of scarce resources of attention. She is required to improvise her skills, tools, and spaces by changing conditions or environments (such as when orders pile up for a short-order cook). Incidental inconveniences simply add a slightly changed condition. This is expert improvisation entirely different from rote industrial production on an assembly line. "In the tension between freedom and structure, which shows itself with special clarity in skilled practices, there is something important to be learned about human agency in general."(p. 34) Jigs keep an expert's attention --the quality of skillful mind that makes an expert an expert--properly directed, focused but not over-determined.
According to some cognitive scientists (or philosophers), human beings can develop "extended" or "embedded" cognition. Andy Clark writes, "advanced condition depends crucially on our ability to dissipate reasoning: to diffuse achieved knowledge and practical wisdom through complex structures, and to reduce the loads on individual brains by locating those brains in complex webs of linguistic, social, political, and institutional constraints." (Crawford chapter 1 fn 2) Advanced (expert) cognition is embedded in an environment and suite of practices the break down complex problems into simpler pieces.
Crawford writes, "The point is that to understand human cognition, it is a mistake to focus only on what goes on inside the skull, because our abilities are highly "scaffolded" by environmental props—by technologies and cultural practices which become an integral part of our cognitive system."(p. 35) In a note, Crawford goes on to extrapolate (following Andy Clark and Michael Wheeler),
" . . . we have inherited certain genetic endowments and limitations, but these [evolutionary developments] are massively underdetermining of the resources that individuals bring to the adaptive problems they face. Culture—the particulars of our inherited linguistic, social, and material equipment—establishes the setting for childhood development and all subsequent learning. In the course of that learning our brains undergo both fine-grained and structural changes that are hugely consequential: changes that depend on our experiences. There are, then three time scales that matter for the question of how we come to be what we are: Darwinian evolution, the history of a civilization, and the life course of an individual." (Crawford, note 4, p, 260-261)
Cultural jigs are an expression for the "triple helix" of genetic, evolutionary inheritance, "the rich soil of historically well-sedimented norms and practices," (p. 39-40) and individual character, the stamp left by individual experiences and personal histories (some of which unavoidably exhibits some elements of "givens" --the particular inborn traits that are spatial, musical, kinetic, and so on. (One need not elevate these to "intelligences" to note the high degree of variability amongst individuals.). The point is that any particular "cultural jig" is not itself infinitely flexible, but can be deployed flexibly by skilled practitioners as they organize their environment, in command of their own actions. Cultural jigs are seen in individuals adapting their skills and environments; "the norms that cultural jigs express and reinforce tend to be reiterated, fractal-like, along different axes of social life; they are robust in that way." (p. 39)
Crawford's examples illustrate his interest in the management of attention. (Remember that jigs keep an expert's attention focused but not over-determined.) Protestant Republicanism, Benjamin Franklin's "be frugal and free," are actions of a socialized individual in a variety of cultural environment. By contrast in any consumer situation an individual's attention is already managed by product placement, web design, and a host of other factors. Attention is the scare resource, and who really controls it, is the question. (The administrative state? Choice architects employed by corporations? An individual or small, face-to-face community?) Individuals in an artificial lab setting, or in front of a solitary digital screen, in isolation can be very poor reasoners: a false premise for many life events, but apt in particular situations. Who is the architect of attention: the skilled practitioner, the choice architect, agents of the state, or—in a very different kind of culture—unchanging and unchallengable patterns of a rigid traditional society? The answer matters for the flourishing of many human activities and attributes.
In my view, a liberal arts education can be considered a suite of cultural jigs that individuals can learn to become skilled practitioners of self-regulation, whether as individuals, or in social contexts—society, culture, and politics in a broad sense. This suite of cultural jigs, further, made sense in previous eras of American history and life. Does it make any sense now? Are the ideas and practices of liberal arts education worth continued practice? If they can be appraised as worthwhile, but simultaneously acknowledged as thoroughly challenged by present conditions, how can they be continued in a society for which they supply a need for skilled practitioners?
Responding to these questions requires a discourse that will be by turns historical, philosophical, and practical. Liberal arts colleges are social and culture institutions in context, both reflecting and contributing to their environments.
I must quickly acknowledge that this inquiry ventures into a conceptual and definitional morass. What is meant by a liberal arts education. If such an education is determined as giving prominent (but not sole) place to the disciplines collectively called the humanities, what is meant by "the humanities?" "Education" as a term is hard enough, "liberal arts" is notoriously slippery, all the more so "humanities." As matters have progressed in the past century, one might well ask whether liberal arts educations have any particular contents at all, much less whether those contents are shared by those who are said to have been educated in liberal arts colleges. What does it mean to study the liberal arts, and what are the institutional context for any such activity, and does it even make sense in the 21st century, beset as it is by severe challenges to any kind of future human flourishing.
This post is merely an introduction to a wider kind of inquiry which I wish to pursue, towards ends I cannot yet fully comprehend. I have a difficult time stating very intelligibly what it is that I wish to pursue. But I have the sense that something important is afoot: the education and practice of creative human attention in time of incentivized and marketable distraction —and distraction from the seemingly impossible contradictions and besetting problems for any kind of recognizable global forms of life in the future. I'm not sure how to get a grip on these questions, on this content.
In April 2020—a stressful month!—I wrote two posts on the unexpected contemporaneity of Barth's Römerbrief and his use of the the word Krisis and its translation into English —and how that translation may have shifted its meaning in Sir Edwyn Hoskyns time and since. This is the last post I will write about The Epistle to the Romans, and I will return to reading Church Dogmatics, still in the first volume.
This modest essay will attempt to point to cultural events and sources that give Barth's book considerable nuance and were relevant to his time (and to his fundamental points). I have not read any study of Barth's Römerbrief that really attempts to put its first and second editions in the social, cultural context of Europe in the early post-war years. I am not really qualified to comment on Barth's German prose and how it compares or contrasts with expressivist or experimental styles in German literature of the post-World War period.
To recap: Barth wrote his celebrated theological commentary during his pastorate in Safenwil, Switzerland during World War I, and published it in 1919. It was an immediate sensation in German-speaking Protestantism, especially the substantially expanded and revised second edition, published in 1922. The second edition (lightly re-edited four more times until 1933) put Barth on the theological map of post-war Europe as one of the most capable "dialectical" theologians. In Great Britain, Edwyn C. Hoskins published an English translation of Römerbrief in 1933, as so-called Neo-orthodoxy was revolutionizing North American Protestant theology, offering a way out of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversies and waning persuasiveness of much of "liberal" theology.
Barth's study in Safenwil, where he wrote Römerbrief. Phonto linked from the Swiss Reformed Church of Aargau
My topic in this modest post focuses upon Barth's modernist sources in Römerbrief. By "modernist" I mean cultural resources and allusions beyond his theological sources in ancient Christian writers, Reformation theologians, and "liberal" theologians such as Schleiermacher, D. F. Strauss, Albrecht Ritschl, and his teachers Adolf von Harnack (d.1930) and Wilhelm Herrmann (d. 1922). In addition, Barth's sources in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard and Fyodor Dostoyevsky have been well-studied; his sources in Friedrich Neitzsche somewhat less so (but neither neglected; see this 1995 article and this 2016 article in Czech ).
These "modernist" sources are really often more allusions or references to "what was everywhere in the air" (preface to the 5th edition, Hoskyns translation p. 21) The world of 1920s Switzerland and Weimar Germany, however, is no longer common knowledge, especially in period 1918-1922. A brief recap:
A series of unmanagable events and changes precipitated and resulted in unprecedented mortality in Europe. The Great War was fought in particularly difficult circumstances (both western and eastern fronts, and in the Atlantic) with disastrous decisions by military leadership and notoriously high casualities. Four European empires either ended or were profoundly re-shaped by the war: German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman Turkish; the French and British empires were severely tested and arguably began long processes of subsequent dissolution (by the 1960s). Constant rain and mud in the trenches accelerated the spread of disease and recent research suggests may also have accelerated the deadly H1N1 influenza virus that claimed millions of lives 1917-1921. The severe shortages of food and fuel in almost every country (except the USA) after 1918 also contributed both to increased immediate mortality and adverse generational health impacts that lasted for decades.
The period 1918—1922 was especially difficult in German-speaking countries; former large states split or were split into unstable polities; the leadership class was severely discredited; economic disasters churned every kind of instability into ruinously high inflation abetted by inexorable and completely unrealistic demands for reparations. Because of wartime censorship, ordinary Germans and Austrians had little real understanding of their armies' defeats, setting up a lost-cause mythology of "the stab in the back" (Dolchstoss Legende) which later was weaponized by Fascists. Years of workers' sacrifices erupted in demands for workers rights and pay raises (in a time of inflation) that led to severe labor strife and the real possibility of further revolution following the Bolshevist, Russian example. Other parties actively sought the restoration of monarchies or imposition of extreme measures.
Recently some of the atmosphere of Weimar Berlin has been vividly evoked in the television series Babylon Berlin (released 2017-2021), based on the novels by Volker Kutscher. Granted, "Red Berlin" was far from Safenwil and Basel not only geographically but culturally (and the novels are set in the later 1920s and early 1930s). Nevertheless, the depiction of politics, poverty, and social change, and post-war trauma elicits a sense of creative instability and an atmosphere of Krisis not irrelevant to many of the original readers of Römerbrief.
The 1922 world of Barth's Römerbrief is not entirely unfamiliar to us: political instability, economic uncertainty, social trauma, racism, pandemic. The Weimar world feels almost-familiar (but with profound differences from 2020s America or Germany as well). Ross Douthat (not a columnist I esteem highly, but nevertheless) wrote, "If the tragedy of Weimar is that it went through a doorway that opened into hell, the drama of Weimar is that so many doors were open, so many different political futures seemed entirely possible." Alienation, possibility, tragedy, trauma —all these social realities shade into the background of Barth's 1922 text, and into the foreground of Barth's reader a century later.
Several specific allusions or cases invoke this sense of almost-familiarity. The war is never far from page. The image of the crater (Hohlraum) occurs four times in the first 40 pages. (The English page numbers below refer to Hoskyn's translation; the German page numbers to the 2nd edition.)
Commenting on 1.3-4, The intersection of the "known plane" of God's creation with the unknown plane ("the world of the Father, of the Primal Creation, and of final Redemption") becomes observable and observed in Jesus of Nazareth, the historical Jesus,
"the point where the unknown world cuts the known world. . . . The point on the line of intersection is not more extended onto the known plane than is the unknown plane of which it proclaims the existence. The effulgence, or rather, the crater made the percussion point of an explrding shell, the void by which the point on the line of intersection makes itself known in the concrete world of history, is not . . . that other world which touches our world in Him. Insofar as our world is touched in Jesus by the other world, it ceases to be able of direct observation as history, time, or thing."
(p. 29; cp. Die Ausstrahlungen oder vielmehr die erstaunlichen Einschlagstrichter und Hohlräume, p. 24)
When commenting on Romans 1.11-12, Barth writes, "The important of an apostle is negative rather than positive. In him a void becomes visible." (p. 33) (Ein Apostel ist nicht ein positiver, sondern ein negativer Mensch, ein Mensch, an dem ein solcher Hohlraum sichtbar wird. p. 29) --the void is in fact an Hohlraum, here a lacuna, but redolent of the crater (Einschlagstrich) above.
In commenting on 1. 16-17, Barth writes that the activity (teaching, ethics, worship) of the Christian community (Christusgemeinde) is strictly related to the Proclamation of the Gospel —but only insofar as "it is no more than a crater formed by the explosion of a shell and seeks to be no more than a void in which the Gospel reveals itself." (p. 36, sofern das alles nur Einschlagstrichter ist, nur Hohlraum sein will, in dem die Botschaft sich selbst darstellt, p. 32) Anything so-called Christian but unrelated to the Gospel is a human by-product, "content would be substituted for a void, convex for concave," (sofern es allenfalls statt Hohlraum Inhalt, statt konkav konvex, p. 32) --Hoskyns' English softens the strong German metaphor, occurring so soon after the explosion of a shell.
This violent imagery of exploding shells and resulting craters works in tandem with the imagery of meaningless death and suffering mortality that pervades Römerbrief. When commenting upon Romans 6.3-4, ("we were buried with Him in baptism into death") Barth writes, "Death is not grace, if human possibilities are multiplied by it through the coming into being of a whole series of negative (?) things, such as asceticism, "back to nature," silent worship, mystical death, Buddhist Nirvana, Bolshevism, Dadism, and so forth: so long, that is, as the attack does not culminate in the final negation of the man of this world and all his possibilities." (p. 194).
Barth is entirely conscious of the range of movements and choices in exhausted, post-war Europe: he names variously Spartacists, Imperialists (restorationists?), Capitalists, Bolshevism, the "Russian Man" and the Proletariat, "open-air enthusiasts" (p. 508, die Abstinenten, Vegetarianer und Freiluftidealisten der Gegenwart, p. 512). Is this last an encoded reference either to Muck-Lamberty's Neue Schar (see below), or to the Freikorper-Kultur (FKK, or nudist) movement then ascendent in northern Germany?
One allusion in particular is a "cat's paw" for the militant strains of nationalism that will later metastasize into Germany's degraded future as the Third Reich. When commenting on 3.3-4, Barth wrote, "God is true: he is the Answer, the Helper, the Judge, the Redeemer: not man, when from the East or fro the West, whether or Nordic stock or Biblical outlook . . . not the pacifist, not the man of action; not even the superman" (p. 80, Gott ist wahr; Gott ist die Antwort, die Hilfe, der Richter, der Erlöser, nicht der Mensch, weder der östliche noch der westliche, noch der deutsche Mensch und auch nicht der biblische Mensch . . . weder der Wartende noch der Wirkende und auch nicht der Übermensch, p. 74.)
The same applies "Nordic enthusiasm and devotion to Western Culture" (p. 462 freely translated from, Es wirkt nicht eben als Bestärkung in etwaigen „Idealen”, ob es nun persönliche oder kollektive, völkische oder internationale, humane oder konfessionelle, deutsche oder westliche, jugendliche oder reife, konkrete oder abstrakte Ideale seien, p. 467) Barth is keenly aware of the tendency of the church towards idolatry: "Easter is not a representation in concrete form of the triumph of our lives or of our aspirations—of socialism, for example, or of the "resurrection" of Germany. ( p. 378, when commenting upon 10.6-7, Ostern [ist] keine Darstellung des Sieges unsres Lebens, unsrer Aspirationen (z. B. des Sozialismus oder der Auferstehung Deutschlands! p. 382.)
Barth's skepticism regarding the evolving language of nationalist Germany (recovering then from defeat) extends to his semi-ironic references to German leaders. Barth cites ironically Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz (in the preface to the 5th edition, p. 23, es sei leicht ein Fähnlein auf die Stange zu setzen, aber schwer, es mit Ehren wieder herunter zu holen, p. 22), "whereas it is easy to hoist your flag, it is difficult to strike it honorably" —this from the father of the German fleet, and advocate of unrestricted submarine warfare, dismissed in 1916 and co-founder of the Deutsche Vaterlandspartei. Honor, indeed.
Tirpitz also appears much later in the text, in Barth's introduction to "The Great Disturbance," (Romans chapters 12-15), when commenting upon 12:1, on the subject of exhortation. If "exhortation be the exposition of the validity of grace, [then] it involves a perception of the pre-supposition of grace in all concrete phenomena. . . . [and] can therefore be undertaken only where the pharisee and the Publican have thrust together onto one step." Barth disallows any separation of sheep and goats, and exhortation is only possible where any "moral indignation against . . . a Tirpiz, or a Bethmann-Hollweg, or even a Lenin has entirely ceased to exist." (pp. 428-429; und also gar kein moralisches Ressentiment gegen einen Tirpitz z. B. oder gegen einen Bethmann-Hollweg oder auch gegen einen Lenin vorliegt; pp. 434-435). These are names that evoked enmity in 1922: not only Tirpitz, but against the much-despised Theobald von Bethman Hollweg, Chancellor of Germany in office 1909-1917, who had just died in 1921. Vladimir Lenin is much better known and in 1921-1922 had recently conscripted labor, and was expelling dissidents from Russia on the heels of the Russian famine of 1921-1922 that caused over 5 million deaths. Many of the dissidents and other Russians were gathering in German cities, especially Berlin. Barth's list is a role of dishonor indeed.
When a few pages on commenting upon Romans 12:2, Barth wrote that "there are actions from which the light of sacrifice shines . . . that the peculiarity of God . . . might be disclosed, and that He may be known as—Lord." This particular "enlightenment" disturbs humans, "whether they be formed according to idealism of a Ludendorf [sic] and a Lenin or of a Foerster and a Ragaz." (p. 435, Und dieses Leuchten stört den Menschen, den Idealmenschen nach dem Schema Ludendorff-Lenin und den Idealmenschen nach dem Schema Foerster-Ragaz, p. 441) What is the Ludendorff-Lenin "scheme" but the human as a completely ideological, politicizing being, whether in thrall to the nationalist right or the Communist left? Ludendorff was the German General who helped Lenin return to Russia, who was blamed for German defeat as well as personal cowardice (slipping out of Germany in disguise in 1919), and who subsequently led German nationalists in right-wing politics in the 1920s. His writings formed the basis for the ruinous "stab in the back" (Dolchstoff) ideology. Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster is less remembered, an academic who was a strong opponent of German militarism, in exile in 1922 after receiving death threats from irredentist German nationalists. Leonhard Ragaz is better remembered by historians and theologians as a founder of religious socialism in Switzerland, and an influence on Barth through the Socialist Party during Barth's years in Safenwil. These were all names that Barth expected his 1922 readers to recognize as controversial or infamous.
Finally, Barth's modernist world of 1921-1922 included reference to a then-well-known sexual scandal which has long since faded into obscurity.
Muck-Lamberty with followers; photo: Stadtarchiv Erfurt
Friedrich Muck-Lamberty (born 1891) grew up in the German fringe vegetarian and Wandervogel movements, which protested against German industrialization and sought to commune with nature. He spent the war with the German Marines on Heligoland, an island in the North Sea off Bremen. In the aftermath of the war he sought a rebirth of Germany through spiritual development of individuals. Blending spiritualist philosophy, German ethnic ideas, and what would now be called environmentalism, he called himself a "pioneer of a new age" and his followers hailed him "the Messiah of Thuringia." He placed women (the Eternal Feminine) in a salvific social role in which Christ-consciousness would be reborn amongst the Volk. (It should be noted that Thuringia was one of the places where the National Socialist Party [NSDAP] received its greatest support before 1933, and where the modern Alternativ für Deutschland has become powerful in the last 10 years.)
In 1920 Muck gathered a Neue Schar (new host or crowd) of young people who walked through Franconia and Thuringia. They gathered on Pentecost Day bound for the Wartburg (associate with Luther and German purity), advocating a nationalist commune against exploitation, and practicing meditation and an intense group life. Over 10,000 young people gathered in Erfurt, evoking the Children's Crusade. Although some Protestant clergy welcomed Muck-Lamberty and his crowd, Catholic clergy, workers groups and socialist parties condemned him, and German Nationalists regarded him as a "Bolshevik." In winter of 1920-1921 the group set up communal life at a rural hostel that was intended to produce handicrafts. Elements of this movement evoke the later "Summer of Love" of 1967 in San Francisco, and later communal experiments.
During that winter Muck-Lamberty was accused of sexual promiscuity and running a "harem economy" (Haremwirtschaft), accusations made particularly credible because of the strongly erotic and "naturist" mood of the movement. The group had to leave their winter quarters in February 1921, and Muck-Lamberty and the Neue Schar retired from public view. (Subsequently Muck married; he scorned the Weimar Republic, but kept his distance from the Nazis, then re-located to West Germany after trouble with the Soviet occupation. His craft business was continued by his children after his death in 1984.
Unsurprsingly, Barth was not impressed by Muck-Lamberty. When commenting an "an episode:" Romans 9:19-21, on human fallibility, "the appalling disturbances which can occur on the frontier where the Gospel is proclaimed . . . do not constitute an argument against the Truth" [of the Gospel]. Nietzsche's life (and illness) demonstrated that for humans The Truth is intolerable: when approaching God too closely, "they are thrown out of gear." So also for the conclusion of Dostoevsky's The Idiot, the destiny of Hölderlin, and ". . . the inevitable catastrophes in the history of the Baptists—Muck Lamberty—make it all too clear that . . . humanity has no alternative but death when confronted by the Truth." (p. 354, die unvermeidlichen Katastrophen alles Täufertums (Muck-Lamberty!), sie können doch nur erschütternd klar machen . . . daß der Mensch in seiner vermeintlichen Fülle, Gesundheit und Gerechtigkeit an der Wahrheit nur sterben kann, page 358).
Barth judged Muck-Lamberty very harshly, and it is a fair point that "the Messiah of Thuringia" had little to do with real Baptists—this is a derisive snort from a sometimes rather smug Swiss Reformed pastor (who himself would become involved in controversial household sexual relationships). Nevertheless, by referring to Muck-Lamberty, Barth pointed his central argument squarely against any such a "youth movement." The modernist impulse that in part moved Barth to write Römerbrief, especially in its pointed second edition, is part of the same cultural context that gave force to Muck-Lamberty's protest against industrial exploitation and the bourgois pretensions of post-war Germany. For both, all was not well (and would get far worse than they might have imagined i 1922).
Barth also has an unfortunate, sarcastic reference to "most heroic, most powerful prayers" of Prophets, Apostles, and Reformers, "not mention the artistry in prayer of the Ama-Xosa and the "Kekchi Indians" (p. 316, wahrhaftig auch das der Propheten, Apostel und Reformatoren, um von den Künsten der Xosakaffern und Kekchiindianer gar nicht zu reden! p. 320). Barth alluded to Friedrich Heller's book on prayer, which used "history of religions" and "religious psychology" disciplinary approaches which Barth despised. But this unfortunate reference also has more than a whiff of German-speaking imperialist racism, mocking as it does the Xhosa people of South African and the Qʼeqchiʼ Mayan people of Belize, Guatemala, and Chiapas state of Mexico. Xosakaffern in German is plainly derisive and racist (Kaffir). Barth's cultural references do not insulate him from the widely-shared racism of his time which mars his text in this passage.
Reading Römerbrief in 2020-2021 evokes a cultural and political context uncannily reminiscent of those tumultuous post-World War I years of populist revolt, social and economic disorder, famine, natural disaster, and epidemic. By summoning up the images of military defeat, the violence of the battlefield, the cowardice and ineptitude of national leadership, alt-right political language, and sexual episodes, Barth situated his hand-grenade of a book not only in dialectical theology, existentialist philosophy (as then known) and Russian literature, "masters of suspicion," (per David Tracey) but squarely in the provocative and perilous cross-currents of German-speaking Europe. His book, taken seriously, is still a hand-grenade of an argument in 21st-century Europe and North America (and very probably elsewhere as well).
I noted with interest last Saturday the card catalogue* in the Hendel Library of the Lyman Allyn Museum in New London, Connecticut, which I was visiting for the first time (though I have lived in Connecticut since 2006). I noticed the familiar build-in wood drawers for the cards, and on a whim opened one of them, expecting to find it empty (as usual). To my surprise, I encountered real catalogue cards and nary a library computer in sight.
I hasten to add that the Hendel Library is a beautifully furnished room in the Deshon-Allyn House, built in 1829, and which combines Federalist and Greek Revival design elements. The library is not really a functioning library, but an event space available for rentals. I expect that the collection has been static for decades, and some of the books probably exhibit familiar problems of aging and minimally cared-for collections. The room features a large hand-crafted model ship by Pasquale Montesi, an Italian immigrant and former sailor in the Italian navy, who settled in nearby Norwich in 1898, and ran a fish market there. Montesi crafted his models on the basis of memory and intimate knowledge of sailing ships, without blueprints or drawings. (Hence the design elements are not to scale.) Most visitors to the Museum see an elegant room with a large ship model, and ignore the surrounding library.
I began to wonder: how many card catalogues still exist? Where are they located? Are any actively maintained? —even informally, and not according to cataloguing rules as known to several generations of cataloguers, since OCLC printed its last catalog card on October 1, 2015 (sent to the now-defunct Concordia College of Bronxville, N.Y.), and Library of Congress Distribution Service (still active digitally) printed its last card in 1997. I am considering putting out a call to discover where card catalogues still exist. This is not to fetishize card catalogues: I wouldn't want to go back to them, but they are or were a notable technology in building scholarship and literature in the 20th century.
*A note on spelling: catalog and catalogue are both acceptable in American usage. Catalog is sometimes used as a noun, and catalogue as a verb. Catalogue as a usage predominates in British and world-wide usages. I prefer catalogue (and I was once a cataloguer, but for me the spelling is not a matter of doctrine or politics.
MaryAnn Corbett is an American poet who lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. She has worked as an indexer, is a medievalist, linguist, and has won a number of awards including the Able Muse Book Prize (2011 and 2016), the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, and the Richard Wilbur Award. See also: Police Procedural
Observations Concerning the Role of the Anglican Funeral Service in the Murder Mystery
Man that is born of woman (saith the prayer book) hath but a short time to live, especially in British detective dramas since it is foreordained that some poor sod will be shot, strangled, drowned, or brained with a shovel before the opening credits and theme music.
And because in the midst of life we are in death, at least in prime time, he shall go to his grave, his procession filmed in an arty overhead shot with clergy in cassock and billowing surplice sleeves intoning, while the dewy detective sergeant gently pries from the grieving mother or widow some awkward bit that detonates revelation.
And then we’re off in a furious search for justice with sirens, dangerous driving, and rural scenery. Even a bumbling American such as myself is edified by glorious cinematography and the blessed assurance of the Psalmist’s pastures which are in Yorkshire, and his still waters in Oxford.
This gives us time to forget the Lord’s great mercy, which we have prayed for, but certainly do not want (pace the judge in robe and wig and cap) for the actual perp, whose evil, twisted soul is explicated by the genius sleuth in a five-minute last judgment.
Forasmuch as it hath pleased almighty God to permit in this life the deceptions that make for mystery, let us be grateful, collapsing in our recliners in the sure and certain hope that ninety minutes will offer us righteousness before we sleep.
The "Girls' Section" of OUP's bindery. Printed sheets are folded by the women using ivory rulers (also known as bone folders), and the folded sheets are then gathered into sections to be sewn. Women are little-credited in the history of the book.
A great writer, a misogynist, an Episcopalian, a great reader, a great friend to many . . . all those things are true. The poem below, nevertheless. Tolle, lege.
Seven Stanzas at Easter
Make no mistake: if He rose at all it was as His body; if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers, each soft Spring recurrent; it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the eleven apostles; it was as His flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes, the same valved heart that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then regathered out of enduring Might new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages: let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché, not a stone in a story, but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will eclipse for each of us the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb, make it a real angel, weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.
In 2018 the British Library assembled seven videos the show how elements of medieval manuscripts were made. These videos focused on the work of Patricia Lovett and others at the Library.
Medievalists.net assembled these videos --supplemented by these articles at the British Library's site, Medieval England and France, 700-1200.
Alex Langland'sCræft: An Inquiry into the origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts (2017) is fun to read and filled with many illuminating asides about numerous everyday matters in pre-modern life. For those of us interested in early medieval Europe, it's a treasure trove of suggestions for understanding the ways things were done or might have been done. I very much appreciate that this trained medievalist has chosen to write for a wider audience. He has solid hands-on knowledge of an astonishing array of subjects, sometimes gained during his work with BBC on programs regarding historical farming at various periods.
While he devotes attention and care to the traditional ways of tanning hides and producing varying qualities of leather, he does not explore the making of parchment or vellum for manuscripts, nor the manner of production of inks, writing instruments, or crafting environments. I felt this lack, because the production of manuscripts is an example of the intricate inter-dependencies of medieval cræft and orders of knowledge, trade, and wide cultural resonances. On the other hand, Langlands is a trained archaeologist, so texts are often for him a secondary concern.
I was left a little uneasy with the wording "true meaning," perhaps a subtitle inserted on an editor's insistence insofar as to those outside of the study of early medieval vernacular languages, cræft won't mean much. There were and are many meanings of this crafts and modes of production. Who is to say which of them is "true?" Langlands is at his best when he pursues the entanglements of environment, local customs, skills, and needs to show how almost all everyday customs and objects for ordinary people were sourced locally in reasonably sustainable practices. The truths he points to are practical insight gained at the intersection of skill, material, location, and tradition, a deeper sense of cræft as a form of life.
Langland's concern for the destructiveness of modern and post-modern industrial practices (especially plastics) is well-warranted. He failed to note, however, the medieval and early modern agricultural practices which degraded some lands and environments. Granted that far smaller populations generated less negative environmental impact, it is still worth noting the inefficiencies and frictions of medieval and early modern societies that motivated some populations to move out to new horizons, and perhaps come into lasting conflicts with previous residents. Why did, for example, so many Norse leave Scandinavia? Could patterns of over-populations and customs of ever-smaller land holdings for agriculture have played a role? Was there sustained environmental damage done in some relatively fragile nordic locations, such that agricultural, hunting, and fishing yields diminished to the point that people emigrated?
I do enormously appreciate Langland's insistence that many traditional practices and cræfts embodied knowledge and a real wisdom concerning available materials, and that medieval people were far more clever and aware of their surroundings and impacts than modern scholars are often likely to credit. They were hardly stupid; for the same reasons, many sought to leave subsistence or exchange agriculture because of precarity, rising social expectations, and increasing awareness of the outside world and its possibilities. It wasn't an easy life.
One notes that Langlands does not discuss traditional cræft of medicine, healing, pain management, dentistry, or the challenges of plague and pestilence. Since the 18th century it's hard to argue that standards of living have not risen for a very great portion of the world's populations, and even deeply impoverished populations have more access to more resources than they might have had in centuries past. It's also impossible to avoid the realization that the modern and post-modern methods of meeting human needs are not sustainable. In a coming era of population stability or decline, returning to many traditional manners of living and working may help to alleviate some of the worst impacts of global warming (if anything can do that at all). No one will want to go backwards to traditional medicine, however, no matter how attractive natural remedies are. Selective pre-modern modes of life and production might well be introduced to leaven and reduce the impact of modern or post-modern modes.
What I learn again from Langlands is humility: the ancients and pre-moderns knew far more and far better than often is understood or realized by those outside rather narrow scholarly circles. To re-learn and re-member sustainable agriculture and societies that are environmentally low-impact will require unlearning a lot of facile and pseudo-knowledge and attitudes commonplace in complacent post-modernity. Langland's book is an engaging, readable, and positive wake-up call, even as global catastrophe seems unavoidable.
