In his Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum, Karl Barth depicts the “character of knowledge” as follows:

"So we shall have to interpret the medial character of knowledge in Anselm’s sense by saying that knowledge stands between faith and vision in the same way as we might say that a mountain stands between a man looking at it from the valley and the sun” (Barth, 1960, p. 21).

This citation encapsulates much of Barth’s introductory comments in his Anselm book and is referred to both directly and indirectly three times throughout (Barth, 1960, p. 21, 27, 34-35). In many ways it is a focal image for the way he interpreted Kant’s Copernican turn, and the conclusion of his Critique of Practical Reason where Kant notes his “increasing admiration” for the “starry heavens above me” (Kant, 1997, p. 133, 5:162). As Barth would argue in his 1930 lecture on Kant, starry heavens have to be understood as laying hold of us just as much as we may claim to lay hold of them (Barth, 2001b, p. 262).

I'm writing on the first volume of Barth's Church Dogmatics at the moment and this focal image of theological knowledge continues to echo there as well. Barth's theology draws our attention to the interrim and limited nature of human knowledge. Like St. Paul's discussion of seeing through a mirror dimly, our knowledge is never complete. The open-ended nature of knowledge sounds all too familiar in light of Jacque Derrida's "Other" and the scepticism Jean-Francois Lyotard notes concerning meta-narratives, but it's always helpful to remind ourselves of some of the more overtly theological voices echoing in the postmodern canyon.

In any case, I went hunting for a picture to go with Barth's quote and found this beautiful sunset on istockphoto.com. Maybe it'll provide a little inspiration for the day.