In this article, I examine Karl Barth's engagement with ‘personalist philosophy’, also known in its twentieth-century German instantiation as ‘dialogical personalism’, ‘dialogicalism’ or Redephilosophie. After briefly clarifying my use of the term ‘personalism’, I will advance the following two interconnected claims. First, contrary to scholarly assessments of Barth which argue for an early, deep influence by personalist thinkers, I claim below that Barth's initial stance towards dialogical personalism was primarily one of criticism and resistance. Barth's interaction with the founders of the so-called ‘Patmos Circle’, his fellow dialectical theologians and Martin Buber indicate that from a very early date Barth evinces considerable suspicion regarding the categories of encounter (Begegnung), co-humanity (Mitmenschlichkeit) and, most particularly, the I–Thou relation (Ich–Du-Beziehung). Second, I argue that when Barth does employ personalist themes in his theological anthropology, particularly the Church Dogmatics, III/2,Footnote ¹ he recasts them in a theological – not philosophical – mould. That is, Barth grounds his understanding of the human being as a being-in-encounter in his christology and trinitarian theology, radically reshaping personalist categories and rebuilding them from the ground up.

In emphasising that Barth's was a highly critical appropriation of personalism, I do not suggest that his thought is free from all continuities with the dialogical personalists who precede him. However, previous treatments of Barth's personalism – few though they may be – have typically focused on the similarities between Barth and dialogical thinkers in the interest of drawing lines of influence from the latter to the former. As a result, Barth's resistance to – and criticism of – dialogical personalism have been downplayed, and the distinctive features of his own personalism have been hidden from view. My hope is that accentuating the differences between Barth and the articulations of personalism which precede him will be instructive for reading his theology, particularly his theological anthropology and theological method.

Regarding the term ‘personalism’, then: it would seem that few words in contemporary philosophy are used in such a wide variety of ways. This state of affairs has led Van Harvey memorably to complain, ‘the designation indicates very little because of the various conceptions of personality actually held by philosophers and the various possible world views called personalism’.Footnote ² Such imprecision can be attributed, in part, to the fact that the term comes into regular philosophical use in three distinct intellectual milieux within a relatively short period of time. The French philosopher, Charles Renouvier, wrote Personalism in 1903; the German philosopher, William Stern, wrote Person and Thing (which he describes as ‘critical personalism’) in 1906; and the American founder of ‘Boston Personalism’, Borden Parker Bowne, published Personalism in 1908.Footnote ³ At its most generic, the term could be said to denote a way of thinking in which ‘persons are regarded as the sole or highest form of reality, and therefore, as possessing intrinsic value’.Footnote ⁴

For our purposes, the modifier ‘dialogical’ is significant in that it delimits our inquiry to a particular strand of personalist thought which arises in early twentieth-century Germany with the late writings of Hermann Cohen. His 1919 Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism,Footnote ⁵ in particular, inspired Franz Rosenzweig, Ferdinand Ebner and Martin Buber to compose works which are regarded as foundational to the philosophy.Footnote ⁶ Other figures most often associated with dialogical personalism include Gabriel Marcel, Eberhard Grisebach and Leo Weismantel, but one also finds Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Søren Kierkegaard and Ludwig Feuerbach listed among the ‘forefathers’ of the philosophy.Footnote ⁷

The central claim of dialogical personalism, if we may hazard one here, is that the human being is constituted in encounter with another. Of course, quite a bit depends on how the term ‘constituted’ is meant, but at present it will suffice to say that, at its root, dialogical personalism holds that the individual, the ‘I’, is in an important sense incomplete without another, the ‘Thou’. The human being finds him or herself in interpersonal encounter; more strongly, the other is necessary in order to be oneself.Footnote ⁸ Importantly, too, it should be noted that dialogical personalism articulates a significant critique of idealistic transcendental philosophy. Specifically, both Buber and Ebner draw a sharp contrast between the I–Thou relationship, or the realm of interpersonal, intersubjective encounter, and the I–It relationship, in which the human being functions as the constituting subject who relates to the world as objects. Since Kant, so these dialogical thinkers say, transcendental idealists have been bound within the world of the I–It relation inasmuch as the ‘turn to the subject’ has rendered all else object. As Wolfhart Pannenberg lucidly puts the twofold problem thereby incurred by these philosophers, ‘They pass over not only the reality of the Thou, but also, and by that very fact, the entire dimension in which the I itself is founded.’Footnote ⁹

Having proposed at least a working definition of dialogical personalism, we can now turn to Barth's engagement with the philosophical movement. As indicated above, scholarship on this topic is limited. Within the work that has been done, three possible sources of Barth's personalism are typically entertained. First, some scholars have argued that the ‘Patmos Circle’ – in particular its founding members Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Hans Ehrenberg – exerted an early, significant influence on Barth's use of personalist philosophy. Second, the use of personalist categories in the work of Emil Brunner and Friedrich Gogarten has led some to make a seemingly intuitive connection between the personalism of Barth and the personalisms of his onetime fellow dialectical theologians. Third, the prevalence of I–Thou language in the theological anthropology of Barth's Church Dogmatics, III/2 has led a number of figures to assume that Martin Buber had a strong influence on Barth's thought. In the remarks which follow, I will trouble these lines of influence, and in particular I will show that there are good reasons to avoid the conclusion that Barth was powerfully influenced by the personalism of these figures early in his career.

Karl Barth and the ‘Patmos Circle’

First, then, the so-called ‘Patmos Circle’ was founded in 1919 by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Hans Ehrenberg in response to the ‘absence of real personal encounter’ in Western culture, through their shared conviction of the significance of ‘a human being who has lived and experienced the thou and the we in their fullness’.Footnote ¹⁰ At its foundation, the Patmos Circle placed heavy emphasis on the interpersonal dimension of human existence, and its founders hoped that such a focus on relationality could make for a more humane society. Hans Ehrenberg's brother, Rudolf, and their cousin, Franz Rosenzweig, are typically listed among the original members of the group.Footnote ¹¹ Through their publication, Die Kreatur,Footnote ¹² the circle also came to include Martin Buber, Ferdinand Ebner, Gabriel Marcel, Eberhard Grisebach, Friedrich Gogarten and a number of other prominent European intellectuals.

A myth of sorts has arisen regarding the influence of the ‘Patmos Circle’ on Barth's early thought. The presumption has been that Barth's involvement with the circle significantly determined his use of personalist categories in his theology, most particularly the I–Thou pairing which pervades his theological anthropology. At least four factors have given rise to this belief. First, and most likely at its root, lies a recollection by Rosenstock himself, who in his 1947 ‘A Look Back at The Creature’ writes that Barth was among the co-founders of the Patmos publishing house.Footnote ¹³ Rosenstock also proudly intones that for their cause, ‘Hans Ehrenberg won the irreconcilably Confessional Karl Barth’, giving the impression that Barth had fully signed on with the group.Footnote ¹⁴ Second, Eberhard Busch reports that Rosenstock sought Barth out after his Tambach lecture in September 1919 and that at that point began ‘a vigorous correspondence between the two’.Footnote ¹⁵ Busch later conveys that Barth left the circle in 1922 because, as Barth put it, ‘they wanted to overwhelm me and choke me with their gnosticism’.Footnote ¹⁶ Third, Stuart McLean adds an explicit claim of intellectual influence to the story in his Humanity in the Thought of Karl Barth.Footnote ¹⁷ Regarding Barth's involvement with the ‘Patmos Circle’, McLean writes, ‘I suggest that the dialogue within such a network of people was important in shaping the most innovative structure of Barth's theology: the central place of the I–Thou relationship, of the word as dialogue.’Footnote ¹⁸ Strengthening this claim further, McLean goes on to say, ‘It is difficult to characterize the core of Barth's re-understanding of the traditional doctrines of the church without a deep appreciation for this influence.’Footnote ¹⁹ Last, Graham Ward has recently added to the myth in his Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology.Footnote ²⁰ Ward maintains that Barth's involvement with the ‘Patmos Circle’ played a crucial role in his supposed conversion to dialogicalism, as Ward puts it, between the first and second editions of Barth's Epistle to the Romans.Footnote ²¹ The academic world has thus been left with the impression that Barth was an original member of the ‘Patmos Circle’, that he co-founded the Patmos publishing house and that he remained a part of the circle for three years, 1919–22. These biographical details have been picked up by McLean and Ward to undergird theories of a decisive intellectual influence by the ‘Patmos Circle’ on Barth's early thought.

It is understandable that scholars would succumb to the temptation of locating the sources of Barth's personalism in the ‘Patmos Circle’. Personalist categories are of great importance to Barth, as George Hunsinger has shown,Footnote ²² and yet Barth does little by way of indicating their sources. Furthermore, the ‘Patmos Circle’ leaps out to the historian as a veritable ‘who's who’ of dialogical personalism, as it included the most prominent figures in the philosophical movement. Confident reports of Barth's involvement in the group would seem to provide the perfect answer to an important question.

In matter of fact, however, from his very earliest encounters with Rosenstock and Ehrenberg in 1919, Barth displays a wariness which quickly develops into an explicit distancing of himself from these co-founders of the ‘Patmos Circle’. Below, I will mount an historical argument which resists the conclusion that the ‘Patmos Circle’ had the sort of importance to Barth suggested in recent scholarship.Footnote ²³

Busch notes that there was a ‘vigorous correspondence’ between Rosenstock and Barth in 1919 and 1920. What he does not mention, however, is that the correspondence was completely one-sided, and that Rosenstock was the only one involved. In my recent research at the Karl Barth Archive in Basel, Switzerland, I observed that Rosenstock wrote eleven letters to Barth from October 1919 to November 1920; however, there is no record of a single response on Barth's part. Barth did answer letters from Hans Ehrenberg, but the correspondence was extremely lopsided, and unusually late in coming: to Ehrenberg's 58 letters between 1919 and 1934 Barth replied only five times, and these letters from Barth began in 1928, nine years after he made Ehrenberg's acquaintance.Footnote ²⁴ Furthermore, on the few occasions that Barth did respond to Ehrenberg, he did not shy away from expressing his frank assessment of Ehrenberg's approach. In unpublished correspondence between the two, Barth signs his first letter, ‘with cordial greetings, but somewhat disapprovingly, yours’.Footnote ²⁵ Barth does at times express a desire to maintain close ties with Ehrenberg, but the obstacle that stands in the way of their friendship is instructive for us. I have translated one particularly significant passage from Barth's second letter to Ehrenberg as follows: ‘We do not stand in the way of one another so strongly . . . that we must always fence with each other completely and to the end from opposite sides of Thou and I.’Footnote ²⁶ Although Barth at this juncture indicates hope for an ultimate resolution with Ehrenberg – one which would never come – it would seem that the signature formula of personalist philosophy occupies a central place in their dispute. Barth's resistance to Ehrenberg becomes even clearer in his later correspondence. There he speaks of his hair bristling at Ehrenberg's method, and he finally writes, ‘You are dear and valued to me, but I cannot reconcile myself to your direction.’Footnote ²⁷

Barth's letters to his close friend and colleague Eduard Thurneysen are also importantly revealing on this topic. Barth's very first communications regarding Rosenstock and Ehrenberg in October 1919 – only one month after the Tambach lecture which sparked their association with one another – advise caution in their relations.Footnote ²⁸ In November Barth writes the following about Ehrenberg: ‘He has written a foreword to my lecture, which I had to send back to him with extensive censure marks.’Footnote ²⁹ In December of the same year Barth writes that he is preparing eine Antwort an Rosenstock zu kanzeln.Footnote ³⁰ The German term, kanzeln, can be translated as ‘preach’, but in this context it has a decidedly negative connotation. A sharp rebuke is coming Rosenstock's way, although Barth does not divulge the subject matter of his objection. A few months later, in March 1920, Barth writes of Rosenstock, ‘I explicitly told him that I see certain analogies between the Patmos religion and the near-eastern Cybele cult of Hellenism.’Footnote ³¹ The biographical details go on, but the important point to observe is that Barth's letters from this time period show every sign of resisting Rosenstock and Ehrenberg from the very beginning of their acquaintance.Footnote ³² Furthermore, Barth's engagement with the other original members of the ‘Patmos Circle’ is either highly limited or non-existent. Barth had very little interaction with Hans's brother, Rudolf Ehrenberg, and he most probably did not encounter Rosenzweig's ideas via any direct engagement with his texts.Footnote ³³ Barth never offers a sustained critique of the founders of the ‘Patmos Circle’, but it would seem that they have theological differences he regarded as intractable. Most importantly, for our purposes, the I–Thou formula of personalist philosophy stands out as a core aspect of their dispute.

In light of Barth's comments to Thurneysen, his unpublished letters to Ehrenberg and his lack of correspondence with Rosenstock, it seems unlikely that there was a period of time during which Barth was open to, and deeply influenced by, the original members of the ‘Patmos Circle’. Instead, the evidence points to a relationship which was cautious from its beginnings, and it certainly did not improve as time passed.

Karl Barth and the dialectical theologians

Having examined Barth's relationship with the ‘Patmos Circle’, we turn now to his engagement with the personalism of the ‘dialectical theologians’, Emil Brunner and Friedrich Gogarten. On this topic it should first be noted, as Bruce McCormack has observed, that the dissolution of the dialectical theologians was actually precipitated, at least in part, by Barth's disagreement with the use of personalist categories in the theologies of Brunner and Gogarten.Footnote ³⁴ John Hart, too, has recently suggested that Barth's suspicion of Ebnerian personalism in Brunner's theology intensified their differences in the late 1920s.Footnote ³⁵ Brunner, of course, was particularly influenced by Ebner's concept of ‘encounter’ and the I–Thou relationship, incorporating the idea of ‘personal address’ into his model of revelation and his anthropology.Footnote ³⁶ In this adoption of Ebner's ideas, however, Barth sees Brunner as beginning with a philosophical – and not theological – analysis. Commenting on his reasons for opposing this aspect of Brunner's thought, Barth writes, ‘because I saw him using F. Ebner's anti-idealistic logology . . . just as much as the proclamation of the “Word” (of God)’.Footnote ³⁷ It is precisely Brunner's attempt to ground his theological approach in yet another philosophical system over against the Word of God that Barth resists. Brunner's method simply replaces German idealism with anti-idealistic personalism, but theology, Barth claims, is no better for it.

For similar reasons, Barth also indicates resistance to Gogarten's use of personalist categories. As is well known, Gogarten integrates the I–Thou pairing of Ebner and Buber into his ethics in an attempt to overcome an individualist conception of the self which he sees as inherent to idealism.Footnote ³⁸ To Gogarten, however, the encounter between I and Thou is characterised by ‘the unconditional subjection of one to the other, of the I to the Thou’.Footnote ³⁹ To Gogarten, then, the Thou is not only inassimilable to the I; the Thou also authoritatively commands the I to the point of unconditional subjection. Gogarten's personalism also becomes intimately linked to the idea of ‘states of life’ and ‘orders of creation’ (i.e. the notion that each person is created for a particular place in society). Barth, of course, could not endure such talk of a natural order which inheres in creation itself. McCormack points us towards a stinging comment made by Barth about this trend in Gogarten's thought. Barth writes, ‘I would rather be in hell with the Religious Socialists than land up in a heaven in which it will be one's lot to be condemned to a “state of life” for all eternity, to have to gaze at a “Thou” that is foreordained by creation, and to have to maintain this condition for redemption.’Footnote ⁴⁰ As with Brunner, so too with Gogarten, Barth is highly resistant to the use of personalist categories. Ultimately, Barth's critique of their personalism overlaps with his concern with natural theology more broadly considered. That is, Barth sees personalism as yet another philosophical tool used in a general analysis of humanity independent from revelation, and this non-theological investigation is then used by Brunner and Gogarten to form the basis of Christian theology. It would seem, then, that personalism, as used by Barth's fellow dialectical theologians, falls under the same heavy suspicion as natural theology early in Barth's career.

Significantly, too, Barth sharply resists the sort of ‘unconditional subjection’ of which Gogarten speaks in his model of the I–Thou encounter. It is perhaps with Gogarten in mind that Barth later writes in his Church Dogmatics, III/2, ‘An excess of zeal in conflict with the idealistic concept of humanity has sometimes led to the emptying out of the baby with the bath-water. Man has been constructed wholly in the light of the fellow man, and the “I am” has formally disappeared in the “Thou art”.’Footnote ⁴¹ Gogarten is not mentioned by name in the text surrounding this passage, but Barth is clearly critical of any model of the I–Thou encounter which would so radically diminish the I for the sake of the Thou, or vice versa.

This is not to say that Barth learnt nothing about personalism from Brunner and Gogarten. Barth was undoubtedly exposed to such ideas through their writings. What is of note for the purposes of this article, however, is that when Barth speaks about their uses of personalist categories, his comments are invariably critical. Barth's primary stance regarding the personalisms of these dialectical theologians, then, should be characterised as one of resistance. Any appropriation of their thought would not be unselective.

Karl Barth and Martin Buber

Having cast doubt on the notion that either the founders of the ‘Patmos Circle’ or the dialectical theologians functioned as decisive influences on Barth's personalism, we now turn to the thought of Martin Buber. It is often assumed that Buber had an influence on Barth's use of the I–Thou pairing in the Church Dogmatics, III/2.Footnote ⁴² Very few scholars, however, have actually endeavoured to investigate thoroughly Barth's relationship with Buber's thought. Of those who do, Dieter Becker's volume is by far the most complete.Footnote ⁴³ It is certainly of note, however, that at the end of his book-length investigation, Becker evinces considerable reticence regarding the ‘line of influence’ question, concluding only that Buber may have been an influence on Barth's theological anthropology.Footnote ⁴⁴ Whereas Becker's primary effort is to emphasise the continuities between Barth and Buber, I will ultimately attempt to accentuate the important differences between the two thinkers.Footnote ⁴⁵

In relation to the first two topics undertaken above, Barth's engagement with Buber's thought is atypical in a number of different ways. First, it would seem that Barth takes up Buber's work comparatively late in his career. That is, whereas Barth engages with the personalism of the ‘Patmos Circle’ in 1919 and the dialectical theologians in the early 1920s, he does not appear to have been substantially occupied with Buber's thought until the 1930s.Footnote ⁴⁶ He makes no mention of Buber in any of his correspondence, except for one letter directly to Buber himself in September 1936. Even this, however, occurs only at Buber's initiation.Footnote ⁴⁷ Second, also atypically, in the Church Dogmatics, III/2, Barth makes clear that he and Buber have come to many of the same ideas regarding the human being's relational character – albeit via different methods, as will be examined in a moment – and so we do not observe the sort of overt resistance and criticism towards Buber that Barth manifests towards other personalist figures. On the contrary, Barth counts Buber ‘among the wiser of the wise of this world’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Third, whereas Barth's objections to the use of personalist categories by the Patmos group and the dialectical theologians are never developed at any length, Barth does offer a sustained treatment of Buber in a lecture on I and Thou given to his Basel colleagues in 1944.Footnote ⁴⁹ There, for once, Barth undertakes a lengthy engagement with – and substantial critique of – personalist thought, lending us valuable insight into the actual substance of Barth's criticisms.

We begin, then, with the similarities Barth draws between himself and Buber in the Church Dogmatics, III/2. There Barth makes extensive use of the I–Thou coupling in his understanding of the human being as a being-in-encounter. For Barth, there is no ‘I am’ which exists prior to being with others. Instead, Barth writes, ‘“I am” – the true and filled “I am” – may thus be paraphrased: “I am in encounter.” Nor am I in encounter before or after, incidentally, secondarily, or subsequently, while primarily and properly I am alone in an inner world in which I am not in this encounter.’Footnote ⁵⁰ Barth makes the full implications of this point clear when he writes, ‘We cannot accept any compromise or admixture with the opposite conception which would have it that at bottom – in the far depths of that abyss of an empty subject – man can be a man without the fellow-man, an I without the Thou.’Footnote ⁵¹ On Barth's theological anthropology, then, relationality goes ‘all the way down’, so to speak. The human qua human is constituted in an interpersonal encounter, and there is no place in which he or she is alone, separate from such encounter. Barth puts this point in succinct terms when he writes, ‘I am as Thou art’.Footnote ⁵²

This fundamental relationality manifests itself in four different ways, to Barth. First, being in encounter is ‘a being in which one man looks the other in the eye’.Footnote ⁵³ Second, it ‘consists in the fact that there is mutual speech and hearing’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Third, it entails ‘the fact that we render mutual assistance in the act of being’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Fourth, and most intriguingly for his relationship with Buber's thought, being in encounter consists in being with another gladly (gerne).Footnote ⁵⁶ Barth puts special emphasis on this notion of gladness, this freedom of heart and spontaneous joy of encounter with another. It is the ‘secret’ of humanity, Barth writes, humanity's conditio sine qua non. In fact, he goes so far as to say that without this gladness, there is no ‘humanity’ by his definition. Barth writes, ‘What we have here is not just an optional addition to the whole . . . No, if humanity does not consist first and last in this freedom, it does not exist at all.’Footnote ⁵⁷

More will be said below about this rich theme in Barth's theology. For the moment, however, we do well to see just exactly where and how Barth brings Buber into his discussion of fellow humanity in the Church Dogmatics. Buber, Barth says, along with Confucius and Feuerbach, has reached conclusions similar to Barth's own. Barth says that his theological anthropology ‘is led to statements which are very similar to those in which humanity is described from a very different angle (e.g., by the pagan Confucius, the atheist L. Feuerbach, and the Jew M. Buber)’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Helmut Gollwitzer has commented in response to this passage that Barth should not have ‘juxtaposed so unceremoniously the pagan Confucius and the Jew Buber’,Footnote ⁵⁹ and I am in agreement with him here. Barth's brusqueness notwithstanding, we should keep sight of the fact that his effort is to acknowledge that other analyses of humanity have come to understandings which resemble his own. In fact, Barth writes, ‘It would be far more strange if not the slightest trace had ever been found of fellow-humanity, of the humanity of I and Thou.’Footnote ⁶⁰ The mere fact that other systems of thought have come up with a similar idea of fellow humanity does not mean that Christian theology need avoid them, Barth insists.

The crucial distinction to maintain here is between what George Hunsinger has called the ‘assimilated extrabiblical concept’, on the one hand, and the ‘biblically derived doctrine’, on the other.Footnote ⁶¹ That is, Barth maintains that extrabiblical concepts can and often do shed light on certain aspects of Christian theology. The key, however, is that such extrabiblical ideas are critically reconstructed in light of the biblically derived doctrines they approximate. They are ‘thoroughly shattered and recast’, in Hunsinger's words.Footnote ⁶² To use one of Hunsinger's examples, although the existentialist idea of nothingness may serve as a pedagogically useful approximation of ‘real nothingness’, it nevertheless ultimately falls short. It is only when existential nothingness is shattered and recast as the biblical idea of chaos, in this instance, that the fullness of the idea is expressed.Footnote ⁶³

Such is also the case with the extrabiblical understanding of fellow humanity, to Barth. He writes, ‘We need not be surprised that there are approximations and similarities’ to his own understanding of co-humanity.Footnote ⁶⁴ Barth finds it a delight that such conclusions have been reached from another angle. The key idea Barth will have to advance, however, is that such ideas do not fully express the Christian reality, and that there are important distinctions which must be maintained between the two. The question thus naturally arises: in what sense, exactly, are Buber's findings ‘approximate’ to those of Christian theology? Where, precisely, do they depart from Barth's own theological anthropology, and why? Barth makes two responses to this important question within the Church Dogmatics, but for greater clarity on this important issue we will need to examine his 1944 lecture on Buber.

Within the Dogmatics, the first and most fundamental difference between the anthropologies of Barth and Buber lies in the fact that Barth grounds his notion of fellow humanity in his doctrine of the Trinity and his christology. That is to say, human beings may be regarded as beings in relation because they are made in the imago Dei, and the triune God is God in relationship. Barth writes, ‘Humanity that is not fellow humanity is inhumanity . . . The God who is no Deus solitarius but Deus triunus, God in relationship [cannot] be mirrored in a homo solitarius.’Footnote ⁶⁵ Relationality inheres in the triune God, and it is on that basis, to Barth, that the human being, as the image of God, is a fundamentally relational being.

The human being may also be regarded as a being in relation because, in Jesus, we find one who is ‘Man for other Men’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Barth writes, ‘[Jesus’] humanity can and must be described . . . in the proposition that He is man for man, for other men, His fellows’.Footnote ⁶⁷ That is to say, in Jesus we see one who is at his core directed towards other human beings. Because he is at root a ‘man for others’, we must think of him as always in relation. Barth writes, ‘If we see Him alone, we do not see Him at all.’Footnote ⁶⁸ For Barth, Jesus’ humanity (his ‘I’) should be understood as always determined by the Thou of his fellow human beings. Because of the fact that our humanity bears some similarity to that of Jesus – despite the indissoluble difference between our humanity and his – we are also at root directed towards our fellow human beings.Footnote ⁶⁹ That Jesus is thus orientated towards his fellow human beings means that our humanity shares in this fundamental constitution towards relation.

Barth's second response to Buber has stirred considerable controversy. Barth suggests that it is the notion of being with another gladly that distinguishes his own anthropology from those of Confucius, Feuerbach and Buber. These three, Barth says, may have ‘had in view this freedom of the heart, and only failed by accident to tread it to its ultimate consequences, and thus to come to this final conclusion’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Buber has taken exception to Barth's comments. In his essay, ‘The History of the Dialogical Principle’, Buber responds to Barth directly: ‘Among the Hasidim . . . the “willingly” (gern) of the freedom of the heart is not, indeed, consequence, but certainly the innermost presupposition, the ground of grounds . . . I wish I could show Karl Barth here, in Jerusalem, how the Hasidim dance the freedom of the heart to the fellow man.’Footnote ⁷¹ Buber insists here that at the core of the Hasidic notion of humanity stands the very freedom of the heart of which Barth speaks.Footnote ⁷² To my knowledge, Barth never replied to Buber's riposte, a fact which is particularly unfortunate given that Barth's criticism is in truth rather vague. Barth does not offer his assessment of how this ‘accident’ occurred, how or why this freedom of the heart was not followed to its conclusion. Nor, for that matter, does he elaborate on the sense in which Buber did in fact have this freedom of the heart ‘in view’. Barth thus suggests that this ‘gladly’ was seen to some extent, yet Buber's rendering of it is still unsatisfactory for an unknown reason. It is precisely at this point that Barth's 1944 lecture illuminates what would otherwise remain a cryptic and imprecise criticism.

Barth begins his lecture with praise for Buber's work and the extensive, ‘multifaceted’ influence it has had on Protestant theology.Footnote ⁷³ Barth writes of Buber, ‘His thoughts have a profundity and a richness that necessitate attention and esteem.’Footnote ⁷⁴ Later in his lecture, however, Barth devotes a substantial portion of his 25-page manuscript to articulating a number of different critiques of Buber's thought. Here I will focus on the most revealing criticisms, which could be said to be organised around anthropological, cosmological and theological concerns.

First, and most importantly for our purposes, in his lecture Barth is directly critical of the anthropology which underlies Buber's conception of the I–Thou and I–It relations. Specifically, Barth argues that, for Buber, human beings are made so as to be dually directed, so to speak, and as a result they slide from the I–Thou relation to the I–It relation with relatively little consequence. I have translated a key passage from the original German manuscript as follows: ‘A fall away from oneself into the I–It relation cannot make one guilty. It can just as well be that one in one's creatureliness stands in the negative I–It relation as the positive I–Thou relation; from both one remains undisturbed in one's substance.’Footnote ⁷⁵ In contrast to readings of Buber which suggest him to be overly demanding in his ethics, then, Barth claims that Buber actually does not regard the descent into the I–It relation with appropriate gravity. Barth writes, ‘Nothing irreparable has happened when the human being once again falls into the I–It relation. He has not failed himself, nor the Thou, nor the eternal Thou in any actual and final sense that he cannot get back.’Footnote ⁷⁶ In not ascribing the slide into the I–It relation to the sinfulness of the human being, Barth is concerned that Buber has admitted the tendency towards the I–It relation into the very structure of humanity itself. Barth is also concerned that Buber has not sufficiently clarified the process by which one emerges from the I–It relation and moves into the I–Thou relation. Buber certainly mentions grace, Barth observes, but there are a number of moments in I and Thou when it seems that the strivings of the human being are efficacious in this realm.Footnote ⁷⁷

Second, then, and related to his first criticism, Barth is concerned about the cosmology which accompanies such an anthropology. He writes: ‘The descent from the I–Thou relation to the I–It relation . . . cannot offend the substance of humanity because the whole dialectic between the two relationships already inheres in creation itself. In its dual-directedness, the “I” only takes a share of the duality proper to the Cosmos.’Footnote ⁷⁸ Barth thus presses Buber to correct the doctrine of creation he has advanced. ‘“In the beginning is relationship”’, Barth writes, quoting Buber; then Barth adds, ‘Yes, but the I–It relationship just as well as the I–Thou relationship.’Footnote ⁷⁹ Eschatological concerns animate Barth's critique here. The fact that the I–It relation was also ‘in the beginning’, if we can put the point in such a manner, suggests that it will be ‘at the end’ as well. I–It has just as much of a place in the cosmos as does I–Thou. As a result, there can be no final victory of the I–Thou relation.

The previous criticisms lead quite naturally into a third: namely, Barth's concern about the doctrine of God which is suggested in Buber's thought. Not only would God seem to be responsible for the existence of the I–It relation, on Barth's reading of Buber, but God is also unable to offer any sort of eternal deliverance from the dual-directedness of human beings. In constant flux from the I–Thou to the I–It relation, the movement of the human being into the I–Thou relation always remains only a possibility, never necessity.Footnote ⁸⁰ We are given no surety of God's grace; history does not move towards the time when the I–Thou relation will be ‘all in all’. In short, then, Barth could be said to be concerned that, from the perspective of Christian theology, the full implications of Buber's thought lead one to deeply problematic anthropological, cosmological and theological conclusions.

What does all of this have to do with Barth's criticism of Buber in the Church Dogmatics? Quite a bit, I think. At the conclusion of his treatment of co-humanity in Church Dogmatics, III/2, Barth makes clear that the human being is created so as to be directed towards the other gladly. Gladness is not just the crown of humanity, but its root. One thing this means is that by nature he or she is not capable of another choice. Any other choice, any decision not to be with the other gladly arises separately from the nature of the human being. Keeping in mind that ‘nature’ for Barth is always dynamic, always a history in motion, we do well to examine closely this aspect of Barth's understanding of how the human being is created. Barth writes that the human being ‘is essentially determined to be with his fellow-man gladly, in the indicated freedom of the heart. By nature he has no possibility or point of departure for any other choice. If we have to maintain that he has this choice in fact, it does not derive from his nature.’Footnote ⁸¹ In other words, to Barth, the human being in his or her nature is singly directed towards being with the other gladly, not doubly directed such that he or she might choose either this possibility or another. If we are going to talk about how the human being is created, we cannot admit to our discussion a choice against the I–Thou encounter which occurs in gladness.

Barth makes no mention of Buber in this portion of the Church Dogmatics, but in light of his 1944 lecture, we can see that Barth's critique of Buber's anthropology directly pertains to the matter at hand. That is, Barth holds Buber's to be one such anthropology which posits a human being as doubly directed towards the I–Thou and I–It relations, not singly directed towards the I–Thou relation which occurs with gladness. As previously mentioned, Barth suggests that Buber has this gladness in view but, Barth says, he fails to see it through to its final conclusion. I would submit that the ‘conclusion’ of which Barth cryptically speaks entails following through on this notion of being with the other gladly such that it is the only choice, the only possibility of which the human being is capable by his or her nature. Buber's anthropology, then, on this reading of Barth, falls short in that it admits to the very structure of human nature another possibility, the I–It relation, not as a result of sin, but as a result of the way the human being is made by the Creator.

A question remains, of course, as to whether or not Barth's critique of Buber can in fact be sustained, and a full study of this topic would need to evaluate Barth's claims vis-à-vis Buber's position. For purposes of this article, the point to be made is that Barth's 1944 lecture on Buber gives us concrete evidence that Barth in fact resisted Buber's version of personalism more than can be seen in the Church Dogmatics alone, and it additionally sheds crucial light on what has long been a confusing and imprecise criticism of Buber.

Conclusion: Barth's personalism

It should be clear by now that Barth's use of personalist categories in the Church Dogmatics entails a highly critical appropriation of such themes which seek to restructure comprehensively such notions as co-humanity, encounter and the I–Thou relation. In Barth's correspondence regarding the ‘Patmos Circle’ we see that there was resistance to personalist thought, even if we do not receive much indication of exactly why this was the case. In his dealings with the dialectical theologians, more substantively, we find Barth's concerns with natural theology propelling much of his resistance to Brunner and Gogarten's uses of personalist philosophy. Barth's fundamental reconstructive move in ‘shattering and recasting’ personalist categories occurs as he roots his understanding of co-humanity and the I–Thou encounter in the humanity of Christ and the intra-trinitarian relations. In putting the relationship between I and Thou on this new foundation, Barth not only circumvents the natural theology he so forcefully resists in his engagement with the dialectical theologians, he also, of course, distinguishes his thought from that of Buber. In more detailed regard to Buber, we could say that much of Barth's model of the I–Thou encounter itself – if we could extract it from its anthropological, cosmological and theological context – resembles that of Buber, as Barth acknowledges. It is the ‘backdrop’, therefore, which makes all the difference. That is, the fact that Barth's notion of co-humanity is grounded in christology and the Trinity means that everything ‘surrounding’ the encounter between I and Thou is different. It occurs in a different kind of cosmos made by a different sort of creator. It comes from a different beginning and it goes to a different end. It occurs in the context of a different history. Most importantly for the argument of this article, it is ultimately a different creature who is in the encounter, one who is fundamentally directed towards meeting the other in gladness, with no other possibility within his or her nature. Where another possibility arises, there is sin. Where the glad encounter between I and Thou occurs, for Barth, it is rooted in a concrete history in which the relation between I and Thou will have the final victory, will be all in all.Footnote ⁸²