A Guide for the Perplexed
Even a casual reader of Church Dogmatics will soon face frustration at Barth’s recursive style. (“Recursive” here means “when consecutive terms are defined in terms of the previous term”) In other words, Barth seems to repeat himself a great deal in a particularly self- referential manner.
Barth’s style in English often contradicts the appearance of his long paragraphs, spread over dense pages of tightly-ruled text with few indentations. In reality his style is nearly homiletic. The reader can test this by reading him aloud: Barth proclaims nearly as often as he analyzes. His repetitive phrases build on each other. He will pile up concessive and subordinate clauses. He often obscures his own basic subject–verb–object sentence structure.
Barth can be tough to read, but once mastered his style has real rewards. He is equally concerned with what cannot be said, as with what positively can be said. For every Yes a No is lurking, but similarly every No implies a Yes somewhere.
A few hints for the perplexed:
- When you get lost in a sentence, go back and start over, and make sure you distinguish the
subject of the sentence from an introductory clause. - If necessary, read the sentence aloud. Reading Barth can take a long time, and sometimes a few pages a day has to be sufficient progress.
- When Barth inserts a long excursus, treat the excursus as almost a separate small essay. When you finish it, go back to re-read the last sentences of the last larger-print main paragraph. Frequently those last sentences and the first sentences of the next larger-print paragraph will mesh, and the excursus was really a long, dense, digressive or illustrative footnote.
When coming upon a sub-section numbered 2. or 3., go back and read the first sentence
of the previous sub-section (or sub-sections). Barth is a masterful architect –his leading
statements collocate precisely, and the flow of the argument can be seen clearly in such comparisons. - At all times, keep the flow of Barth’s argument in view. He does occasionally digress or
refer (and sometimes object vociferously or sarcastically) to academic or philosophical arguments. Sometimes these have to be re-constructed inductively from the hints he drops about writers or positions he disagrees with. Keeping the flow of the argument in view helps to identify the points when his detours re-join the main progress of his larger text.