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Faith and Europe’s Intellectual History

The European magazine sits down with German public intellectual Martin Walser. This portion of their interview caught my eye: The European: I think that we have to understand Barth in the context of existentialism. Here’s someone who does not want to give up his faith, but who struggles to make sense of it through the […]

The European magazine sits down with German public intellectual Martin Walser. This portion of their interview caught my eye:

The European: I think that we have to understand Barth in the context of existentialism. Here’s someone who does not want to give up his faith, but who struggles to make sense of it through the traditional methods and arguments of Christian theology.
Walser: The existentialism of Sartre has nothing to do with Barth. Sartre is completely within this world, not otherworldly. He can be justified through social actions. Camus, maybe. But I am interested in something else. Once you have awakened to the question of faith, you cannot simply return to your everyday agenda like a committed atheist could. You cannot retreat to the comforts of atheism. Behind us are two thousand years that have been marked by questions about God. Today’s atheistic calm, even from intellectuals, is equal to the eradication of our intellectual history.

The European: Why?
Walser: Because we would have to admit that we were crazy. You cannot spend two thousand years trying to understand God and then simply abandon the question and declare that we’re not interested in it anymore.

The European: Skepticism, atheism, existentialism – all those intellectual traditions have their own long histories that have co-existed with theology.
Walser: I believe that the most important condition for faith is sensitivity to beauty. We have the capacity to find something beautiful. Take Bach or Schubert: Their music was dedicated to God but filled and shaped their worldly lives. If you are a committed atheist, you lean back and miss all the richness of that history. As an atheist, you cannot fully make sense of the music, you have no explanation for their perennial motion and rhythm. I have been touched by that history and I am still moved by it. So I cannot simply abandon questions about the existence of God. I am touched by the works of beauty that have been brought into the world through religion, and I cannot simply embrace the everyday experience of atheism. Our history towards transcendentalism is too rich for that. You don’t need music to express that history – Barth or Kierkegaard use language. Barth’s commentary of St. Paul’s “Epistle to the Romans” are 600 pages of passionate prose. Before reading Barth, I thought that only Nietzsche could be so passionate in writing, in his “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” for example. But Nietzsche’s passion is leading nowhere, the Übermensch doesn’t exist. It is a tendency, not a subject in historical time. Since Nietzsche, nobody has questioned positivism with that much passion.

 Read the whole thing. I found this via The Browser, without question the best aggregator on the web.
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