When this man passes away in death, death that we accept dully or only a little moved when we see it in others, and that we ourselves go to meet just as dully or only a little disturbed, when we see it in Him, what can we know of anything in it that makes it more than just another of those riddles of our existence which we can bear very well by facing up to them with optimistic or pessimistic thoughts, thoughts that are all too knowing or too sceptical? ... this conception in the form in which we have fashioned it and tricked it out with our own ideas is poles away from what the Creed says in crucifixus, mortuus, descendit ad inferos.
Barth's thought here is irreducibly Protestant. It bears, in "another of those riddles of our existence," the mark of Kierkegaard, who perhaps more than any other recognized the believer's capacity to deceive himself. One makes minute adjustments, for the sake of humanity, to brings things down to a level fit to those of average ability, and hardly notices (as Kierkegaard says in The Sickness Unto Death and elsewhere) that what is left has departed in its most fundamental elements from the very thing it began by trying to assert. It is Kierkegaard, and Barth following on him, who recognizes that belief must inform practice, and be before practice, precisely because Aristotle has the right conception of man as a habitual creature.
Pascal, in his wager, tells the person who is perhaps ready to assent to the truth of the propositions of Christianity but not able yet to feel the belief that he ought to fall on his knees and pray. The right spirit, so he says, can be cultivated through the right practices--perhaps only through the right practices.
At Midwest this year, I was a discussant for a paper which tied this portion of Pascal's thought to Tocqueville in Democracy in America. At the time, I asked a pair of questions which seemed to me unrelated but I now think point to the same thing: first, why should we assume that engaging in the practices of politics, especially local politics, will foster a sense of patriotism and love of one's own, rather than the opposite? As someone who loved Ann Arbor Is Overrated and now loves Bull City Rising (and has known more than a few community organizers), local politics seems rather like the perfect location to build lasting enmity: people fight intensely over chicken coops and the brightness and spacing of streetlights. Citizens who fight in this way seem unlikely to form a cohesive group identity. The second question was why, exactly, Americans had managed to swallow much complicated European philosophy so easily--the American, for Tocqueville, begins with it has taken the most sophisticated minds of the old world hundreds of years to develop.
We can take Barth/Kierkegaard's insight to this question: Americans in Tocqueville's day could be as he described him because they were already, through their Protestant ecclesiology, exactly the sort of people for whom local politics could be a source of communal identity rather than difference.* It's not, as Pascal and Tocqueville might assert, that the practice makes them into good citizens: the practices are good because they're already good, or already the sort of people who might produce this result. Further, we can observe part of this (the way social behavior looks in institutions), but, especially in Tocqueville's day, not the other part (the subjective beliefs that make institutions work or fail). Thus one puts one's faith in institutions or practices, and neglects, relatively speaking, proper cultivation of the inner states which make good practice possible (this is, again, the key Barthian/Kierkegaardian insight--once emphasis is placed on practice, emphasis on belief falls away).
Now one is prepared, I think, to come to a larger question, which occurred to me while reading the end of Roger Scruton's Gentle Regrets last night. In it, Scruton tells the story of Europe's progressive de-Christianization, and I think tells the story in a typical way (wherein the Reformation begets the Enlightenment, and it's all Martin Luther's fault). But as he talks about how this occurred in England, it becomes clear the typical story must be wrong. The failure of the Church of England, so he says, is occasioned by people like Matthew Arnold who lose their internal faith but continue to maintain the institutions of the church in a culture thoroughly church-soaked. The emphasis here is on practices and institutions, which finally give way in the 20th century: but this is precisely not Barth/Kierkegaard's emphasis (who would say the institutions don't matter at all if the people do not have the right belief)--it's the Pascal/Tocqueville emphasis. Man is a habitual creature: man can be habituated to anything; it's the ability of reason to interpose, to question, to direct that habituation to the right ends which is the task of every man, and exactly the thing to which Barth points.
*Point of comparison: France, as Tocqueville notes in the Ancien Regime, has almost no local institutions, nor any mediating institutions: everything becomes Paris and the nation.
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