INTRODUCTION

There are several narratives of the years between our own and those of the thirteenth century, all of which have helped to produce the notions of 'modernity' and 'postmodernity'. A number of these narratives have a similar plot structure. For example: the dawn of modernity is evident in the seventeenth century; it arises from/with a new sensibility shaped by figures such as Galileo and Descartes, Hobbes, and Newton; it is characterized by a new confidence in the reasoning subject and by the establishment of a world order to be understood according to the laws of geometry, mathematics, and mechanics; and it is governed by secularized forms of power: nation states, social contracts, civic policing, and judiciary courts. This new sensibility gradually eclipses the ancien régime and fosters the Enlightenment. Romanticism, though in some ways a critique of the preceding rational utopias, shifted the way the world was modelled from mechanical to organic and immanently evolving orders. The anthropological centring of this world view remained, the sciences still offered their culturally significant account of Nature, and the realm of the theological became increasingly privatized as attention turned to interior, spiritual experience. Now two world wars, the genocidal projects of Hitler, the Khmer Rouge, and Idi Amin announce a new sensibility. Late capitalism, with its call for the value of goods to be regulated by the demands of the market, with its mass media promotions, and its fostering of virtual money (electronic banking and credit), produces the globalisms and eclecticisms of postmodernity. The old grand narratives, that gave the world and human experience of it its explanatory shape, have collapsed. Key figures in the promotion of this new sensibility are French and American: Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Stanley Fish, Charles Jencks, and Judith Butler.

THE PROPHETIC FEEBLENESS OF NEO-KANTIAN CHRISTIANITY

The best way to grasp the driving convictions of someone's thought is often to identify what he is thinking against. When understood as a response, assertions that initially appeared abstract and anaemic now acquire vital significance. So it is with Karl Barth's theology and ethics.

The liberal Protestant heritage into which Barth was inducted had been decisively and variously shaped by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). One of Kant's legacies was the tenet that specifically religious acts - that is, of prayer and worship - are idle distractions from the true, moral content of Christianity; and by 'moral' here is meant the fair treatment of other rational human beings. All that is valid in religion is reducible to morality; and morality is reducible to the performance of one's duties to one's fellows.

In the intellectual hands of Albrecht Ritschl (1822–89), the social dimension of Kantian morality – the kingdom of ‘rational ends’ or intrinsically valuable individuals – was combined with the Gospels’ notion of the Kingdom of God to produce a Christian ethic with an emphasis on community. What made this ethic Christian was Jesus’ moral teaching about the brotherhood of man (to use a phrase characteristic of one of Ritschl’s disciples, Adolph von Harnack (1851–1930)), not his religious teaching about the redemptive activity of God the Father. What was valid in Christianity was its affirmation of human duty and community, not the actions of divine grace. This is one reason why Ritschl and his followers may be fairly described as ‘neo-Kantian’.

'In Christ two natures met to be thy cure.' When George Herbert wrote these words, he captured the essence of Chalcedonian Christology, with all its strange complexity and simplicity, in a single elegant line. It is sometimes overlooked that the interest behind Chalcedonian Christology has always been largely soteriological. Herbert's line, however, makes the point very well. It is the saving work of Christ - to be thy cure - which serves as the guiding intention behind the Chalcedonian definition of Christ's person, just as the definition of his person (following Herbert) - in Christ two natures met - serves as the crucial premise of Christ's saving work. Change the definition of Christ's person - make him less than fully God and fully human at the same time - and the saving cure Christ offers changes drastically as well. In other words, just as it makes no sense to have a high view of Christ's person without an equally high view of his work, so a high view of Christ's work - in particular, of his saving death - cannot be sustained without a suitably high view of his person. The work presupposes the person just as the person conditions the work.

FOR AND AGAINST CHURCH AND SACRAMENT

Barth has a curious ambivalence towards the topic of this chapter. On the one hand, he called his great work Church Dogmatics (emphasis added). Each of its volumes (not to mention Barth's many other essays and books) speak within and about the church - or, as Barth came to put it, the body of Christ and thus provisional representative of all the world. In this sense, Barth was a key participant in a peculiarly modern debate over church and the rise of 'ecclesiology'. On the other hand, Barth was always a sharp critic of the church, whether in his early commentaries on Paul's letter to the Romans, his many essays on the German 'Church struggle' in the 1930s, or his smiles over triumphalistic claims that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are 'the century of the Church'. Indeed, he preferred to speak of 'the Christian community' rather than 'the Church'.What are we to make of this ambivalence? Barth's theology from the midst of this Christian community could all but guarantee that he would be marginal to those sections of the modern world for which the church is decreasingly a foothold for personal and professional fame and fortune. Yet his deep criticisms of the church could seemingly guarantee that Barth would also be marginal to the very community from which and to which he spoke. Barth forces us to ask how, if at all, we can speak with one voice for and about as well as against the church.

Barth's treatment of creation and providence in the Church Dogmatics is notable for its effort to make those doctrines distinctively Christian, meaning by that doctrines that reflect the centrality of Jesus Christ for understanding God and world. The methodological and substantive effects of such a project on the doctrines of creation and providence are the focus of this chapter.

First and most obviously, the attempt to make creation and providence Christian doctrines is part of Barth's attack on natural theology. One should turn to Jesus Christ for one's understanding of a world created and ruled by God rather than draw conclusions about such matters from more general observation of the world and its natural and historical processes. One should not, then, assume that the world exists and search for its cause; this way leads to the philosopher’s God, the Creator as world-cause (CD III/1, pp. 6, 11). Nor should one form conclusions about the point or direction of God’s rule over the universe – about the providential arrangement of things – by following the lines of observable trajectories of historical events (CD III/3, pp. 20–3). Both ways of proceeding subordinate understanding of God for us in Jesus Christ to what one supposedly knows on independent grounds about God’s creation and rule of the world, rather than the other way round.

Some years ago, the feminist critic Heidi Hartmann wrote an influential article entitled, 'The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism'. It was a brief against the easy assumption that feminism had natural and ready ties to Marxist theory, and that any feminist who thought the 'woman question' through to the end would become an 'historical materialist' - as Marx styled his own theory - and subsume the women's struggle into the class struggle. Hartmann hoped to put an end to such easy alliances; and a feminist approaching this chapter might hope to do the same. Feminism does not appear to be headed for a happy marriage to Karl Barth. Though comfortable in the presence of socialism, Barth was filled with misgivings about feminism. In the Church Dogmatics, Barth refers to feminism rarely, and then grudgingly. He appears suspicious of feminist claims to equality with men and reluctant to take up feminist theory into the work of dogmatic theology.

'As a theologian one can never be great, but at best one remains small in one's own way': so Barth at his eightieth birthday celebrations, characteristically attempting to distance himself from his own reputation. Nonetheless, Barth is the most important Protestant theologian since Schleiermacher, and the extraordinary descriptive depth of his depiction of the Christian faith puts him in the company of a handful of thinkers in the classical Christian tradition. Yet firsthand, well-informed engagement with Barth's work remains - with some notable recent exceptions - quite rare in English-speaking theological culture. His magnum opus, the unfinished thirteen volumes of the Church Dogmatics, is not always studied with the necessary breadth and depth, and his theological commitments are still sometimes misconstrued or sloganized. The significance of Barth's work in his chosen sphere is comparable to that of, say, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Freud, Weber, or Saussure in theirs, in that he decisively reorganized an entire discipline. Yet Barth's contribution to Christian theology is in many respects still only now beginning to be received.

No sooner had the expulsion decree of 1609 stripped Spain of its last Muslim inhabitants, the Moriscos, than the vicar-general of the Valencia cathedral wrote exultantly to King Philip III: “Hago gracias a Dios que en Valencia ya no se siente hablar en lengua aráviga” [I thank God that we no longer hear Arabic spoken in Valencia] (Fuster 113). Exactly nine hundred years had passed since Arabic had first been brought to the country’s shores by the Muslim conquest of 711. During those centuries the Iberian Peninsula was home to Romance, Arabic, and Hebrew, languages both European and Semitic; to rural, urban, and regional dialects; to writing and untutored speech; to registers and styles suited to court and home, to cathedral, mosque, and synagogue, to harem, battlefield, countinghouse, wineshop, and farm. Any attempt to draw the peninsula’s linguistic portrait not only must comprehend the complexities inherent in all multilingual societies, but must do so over a vast span of time, during which the fortunes of Iberia’s languages rose, fell, and changed together with those of her people.

To a great extent all the major languages of the peninsula followed their own chronologies of development, but the historical events that brought their speakers together could alter this natural evolution. Contacts between peoples acted on the languages themselves, as when vocabulary and structures were borrowed from one to another; or they affected literary expression, as when Romance popular songs inspired new forms of Arabic verse, and Hebrew poetry remodeled itself on Arabic. The social and cultural roles assigned to languages also changed: forms of speech once prestigious grew isolated and were stigmatized; language shifted from a marker of ethnicity to one of religious affiliation. As happens everywhere that languages are in contact, linguistic phenomena in Spain were intimately entwined with political and demographic movements.

As a historical figure, Judah Halevi (Abū l-Ḥ asan) (before 1075–1141) approaches iconic status in Jewish culture. Medieval Franco-German pietists, German Romantics, nineteenth-century Wissenschaft des Judentums historians, Zionist historiographers, modern Hebrew poets, and, more recently, critical scholars of Judaica all embrace Halevi as one of their own, seeing something of themselves in him and his work and occasionally reinventing Judah by projecting their own values onto him. One can scarcely identify another figure of the so-called Golden Age of Jewish culture in al-Andalus acclaimed in so many diverse quarters as the embodiment of literary artistry, sophisticated religious conviction, mystical piety, or protonationalist commitment – a clear testament to the enduring appeal of Halevi’s poetic and religious genius and to the ambiguity of his literary identity.

By all accounts, Halevi was a foundational figure in Andalusi-Jewish culture. A now famous personal letter written in 1130 and preserved in the Cairo Geniza testifies that canonical status was conferred on Halevi during his own lifetime. The correspondent refers to Halevi as “the quintessence and embodiment of our country”–meaning al-Andalus–“our glory and leader, the illustrious scholar and unique and perfect devotee” (Goitein, “Judaeo- Arabic Letters” 341, 343).

One day during his pilgrimage to Mecca and while circling the Kaaba, the Murcian Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240) recited the following verses:

Ibn ʿArabī, who went on to become known as the grand master (al-shaykh alakbar) of Sufi thought, recounts that a young woman appeared and objected to each verse in turn, asking how such a famous and respected sheikh could have so badly misunderstood the workings of love. With the final verse, she lost all patience:

Petrus Alfonsi, an Andalusian Jew who converted to Christianity early in the twelfth century, was just one of the many scholars of his time who lived both in and between Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultures and took upon themselves the task of acting as a bridge between these traditions. Alfonsi’s education in Arabic science, philosophy, and particularly astronomy–and his level of erudition was not particularly extraordinary given the standards in Islamic Spain–gave him something of great value to communicate to Christian Europe. He explains his project: “[I]t is proper that all those who have drunk of any philosophical nectar love each other, and that anyone who might have anything rare, precious, and useful which is unknown to others should impart it generously to others, so that in this way everyone’s knowledge may both grow and be extended in time” (Tolan 172–73). As a converso he sought to convince the Jews of their error in rejecting Jesus; as an Andalusian intellectual, he brought missionary zeal to the dissemination of Islamic and Jewish learning among the Christians of Europe.

Alfonsi lived in a period of great change. The latter half of the eleventh century heralded an enormous shift in the balance of power around the Mediterranean. Christian forces made significant advances both on the Iberian Peninsula, where the Islamic Taifa states were divided and weakened, and in Sicily, which in 1091 fell to the Normans. While these conquests diminished the political presence of Islam in Europe, perhaps paradoxically they also opened up Christian Europe to Arabic philosophical, scientific, medical, astronomical, and literary cultures. Not only had vast libraries like that of Toledo come into Christian hands, but the conquered population of Mozarabs, Andalusian Jews, and Mudejares produced a profound cultural impact: Mudejar architecture, thousands of Arabic loanwords, and new cultural forms such as the troubadour lyric – strongly suggestive of the Arabic and Hebrew strophic poetry (muwashshahs and zajals) born and popularized in al-Andalus.

In Ibn Ḥazm’s enumeration of categories of knowledge and those who master them, knowledge is clearly a polysemous and multivalent phenomenon. Each area required its own terms and territories: the rational discernment (tamyīz) of the intellectual (ʿāqil), the tradition-based knowledge (ʿilm) of the religious textual scholar (ʿālim), the abstract wisdom (ḥikma) of the sage (ḥakīm), and the interpretive legal judgment (ijtihād) of the jurisprudent (mujtahid). Ibn īazm’s categories warn us against presuming too narrow a conception of “knowledge” in Andalusi culture. Ibn Ḥazm also assigns relative priority to the divisions of knowledge, valorizing intellectual over physical pleasure in consonance with much Mediterranean ethical discourse since the age of Plato and Aristotle (cf., for example, Aristotle Ethics 1.1729–42).

THE DIVISIONS OF KNOWLEDGE

The pursuit of knowledge is a structured endeavor, and each community (Muslim, Jewish, Christian) developed its own taxonomies. Such organizational formats are not constant; they carry within themselves individual histories, fault lines, and courses of development. Nevertheless, Ibn Ḥazm, who lived around the midpoint of Andalusi history and who devoted a treatise to “The Division of the Sciences” (Marātib al-ʿulūm), can offer a good introduction.

The great Andalusi polymath and statesman Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Saʿīd al-Salamānī, better known as Lisān al-Dīn ibn al- Khaṭīb, was a bright star in the pleiad of great minds of his age, which consisted of such luminaries as ʿAbd al-Raḥmān and Yaḥyā ibn Khaldūn, Ibn Marzūq, Ibn Baṭṭūta, and Ibn Zamrak. He was born in 713/1313 in the town of Loja of a family of Arab notables, whose members had traditionally been employed in the religious and civil service of Andalusi rulers (al-Maqqarī 5:50). When Ibn al-Khaṭīb was only several weeks old, his father was invited to take a high post at the court of the new emir of Granada, Ismāʿīl I (r. 713/1314–725/1325), and the family moved to the capital. In Granada, Ibn al- Khaṭīb received an excellent education under the guidance of the best scholars of the epoch, whose biographies he gratefully included in his works (al-Maqqarī 5:189–251, 350–603). He studied a broad variety of subjects: Arabic language and grammar, sharia and exegesis, adab and poetry, medicine and falsafa, history, and Sufism. Ibn al-Khaṭīb’s breadth of background is mirrored in a dazzling multiplicity of the topics treated in his writings. His vast knowledge, noble pedigree, and the high post of his father, combined with his unique literary talent and extraordinary memory, destined him for a splendid career at the Granadine court.

The power of this verse, establishing ʿAbd al-Raḥmān’s roots in Syria and his success in al-Andalus, has reached subsequent historians, generations of whom have repeated the poem as proof of an ideological and cultural bridge between Syria and the Iberian Peninsula. It reminds us that the first emir of al-Andalus named his palace outside Córdoba for Ruṣāfa, the estate in Syria where he had spent his youth, and thus links the masculine enterprises of palace building and empire building.

The Umayyads of Córdoba were genetically and culturally the progeny of Muslim Arab fathers. Through a variety of visual and performative signs, they presented themselves entirely as Arab and Muslim, the sons of a pure, uncomplicated patriarchal genealogy. But their mothers were for the most part Christian, often of slave origin or won in diplomatic exchanges. The world of the chroniclers, imams, calligraphers, and architects was peopled largely by men – but family life, where the children were reared until daughters were sent in marriage and sons stepped into the public eye, was ruled by women. Nowhere were the intimate ties binding the ethnic and religious groups that comprised Andalusian culture more evident and more profound than in the domestic arena of the harem. The emirs, caliphs, and sultans who ruled al-Andalus grew up in the secluded family quarters of the royal palaces such as Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ in tenth-centuryCórdoba.

The qasida belongs to those crucial areas in which the Andalusian literary universe is an extension of the classical Arabic one. The qasida is a formal multithematic ode addressed to a member of the elite in praise, in admonition, or in quest of support. Poets and scholars traveling in both directions imported the Eastern heritage into Andalusia, and by the fourth/tenth century, the distant province became the home to centers of patronage that attracted even Eastern poets. The affiliation manifested itself in Andalusian emulations of famous Eastern qasidas by Abū Nuwās, al-Mutanabbī, and others. Only as a second step did Andalusians give up vying with their Eastern cousins to find their own paths, as evidenced by the emergence of the muwashshah. At first excluded from the poets’ official collected works (diwans), the muwashshah gradually conquered high literature, eventually rivaling the qasida in its own sphere of panegyric. But while giving due credit to Andalusian self-assertion within the Arabo-Islamic literary universe, one must also recognize that al-Andalus first earned its legitimacy by excelling in qasida poetry.

Not surprisingly, the study of Andalusian Arabic literature has been dominated by the study of the distinctively Andalusian zajal and muwashshah or the question of literary influences between Muslims, Jews, and Mozarabs. As a result, research on classical poetry in Arabic, a major unifying field in this culture, has suffered (Schmidt 66). Moreover, scholarship on classical Andalusian poetry has tended to focus on genres perceived as typically Andalusian, such as nature poetry, or on personalities differing from the mold of the courtier-poet, such as the doomed last Abbadid king, al-Mu‘tamid, and the independent Valencian aristocrat Ibn Khafāja (Jayyusi, Legacy 317–97; al-Nowaihi; Scheindlin, Form).

In the beginning of his account of the martyrdom of the priest Perfectus at the hands of officials of ʿAbd al-Rahmān II’s court in Córdoba, the author – and saint – Eulogius, who would soon himself be martyred, paused to contemplate the caliph’s contribution to Córdoba as a city: “since his rise to the throne, he has covered it with honor, strewn it with glory and accumulated riches, multiplied the pouring in of all the pleasures of the world, with an amplitude surpassing the imagination, of a kind that crushes in its radiance all the royal predecessors of his race in all that touches secular display, while on the other hand the orthodox church trembled under his terrible yoke”(Memoriale sanctorum 2:1, Patroligia latina vol. 115). In this expansive digression to the story of a Mozarabic martyr can be found a nod to the virtues of asceticism, but Eulogius reserves the most lavish, powerful language for the grandeur of the physical transformations of Córdoba: as he deplores the execution of the priest, Eulogius cannot help but take personal pride that the city now “crushes in its radiance all the royal predecessors.”

If there were ever a moment in the history of al-Andalus during which one would expect a cultural identity to polarize along the lines of religion, ninthcentury Córdoba of the Mozarabic martyrs would be that time, that place. This particular group of Mozarabs had resisted acculturation, had chosen nothing less than voluntary martyrdom as a kind of theater of resistance to Umayyad culture. This violent act and the Mozarabs’ nostalgia for Christian hegemony of the past, in fact, were the centerpiece for a kind of Christian cultural revival. The Mozarabic Christians feared the decimation of their traditional and historical identities in the face of the juggernaut of opulent, complex cosmopolitan literary and visual culture.

The architectural monuments of Norman Sicily reflect a dual heritage. While Monreale’s cathedral (built 1174–82) and Palermo’s Capella Palatina (c. 1140) served Christian religious purposes and communicated their message of salvation via figural representation, their program of ornamentation revealed a continuing interest in dazzling surface embellishment that was the legacy of Islamic visual culture. The predilection for domes on squinches, the patterned geometrical manipulation of brick and tile, and the use of hanging muqarnas (stacked niches that fill corners and disguise the transition from the vertical to the horizontal plane) in architectural interiors are examples of the persistence of the Islamic decorative aesthetic. La Zisa Palace, whose patron was William II (r. 1166–89), was one of many garden palaces and pavilions built by local Muslim craftsmen. Its halls featured a fountain with water pouring over a textured chute (chadar), the entirety crowned by a muqarnas half-dome, and stucco inscriptions in Arabic on the walls that praised the palace as paradise on earth. Gardens, interior fountains, and mural inscriptions were characteristic of Islamic palaces and demonstrate how easily Sicily’s Norman rulers adapted to the comfortable and luxurious Arab style of living.

The cathedral of Santa María Nuova at Monreale is a large basilica with an attached cloister. Its apse exterior is adorned with interlacing stilted arches that frame blind inner arches, resting on slender colonnettes. The textured terracotta and glazed-tile decoration of the enframing bands anticipates the Mudejar churches of Spain (*Mudejar Teruel) and was the product of Muslim artisans working in a largely unchanged ornamental tradition for a Christian patron. The structure of the building served Christian liturgy, but its skin was Islamic and reflected the mixed ethnic and religious population of Sicily under Norman rule.