Owen Barfield insists on his debt to Rudolf Steiner, and regrets that people are prejudiced against Anthroposophy.1 It is probably fair to say that those of Barfield's readers who have not come to him through Steiner do proceed more reluctantly to Anthroposophy than Barfield would like. There are, however, good reasons to take the disciple's advice and read the master: first, anyone interested in Barfield is likely to be intrigued and instructed by Steiner's development of many questions with which Barfield also deals; second, reading Steiner can help us to appreciate not only similarities, but differences, and thereby clarify the special character of the disciple's thinking.

The fact that Barfield is a sensitive literary critic and an accomplished Coleridge scholar has of course served to deflect attention from his Anthroposophy.2 It is tempting, even, to view the interest in Steiner rather as one views Yeats' interest in the Order of the Golden Dawn, and to interpret it as the eccentric formal underpinning for an imaginative achievement which is more considerable than the ideas from which it is built. An obvious rejoinder is that Barfield is not known mainly as a poet; in reading him we encounter arguments, the end point of which is, simply, the Anthroposophical truth.3 Still, the dialogue between the man of English letters and the Anthroposophist cannot be put aside altogether; the fact remains that Barfield's play of imagination and skill as an essayist do make him interesting to readers who will not persist with Occult Science: An Outline. On the one hand it seems we must stop short of saying Anthroposophy is not a central concern; on the other, that all Barfield's virtue emanates from the master.

A possible middle-of-the-road solution might suggest that Barfield popularizes ideas which in their original form are too difficult for most readers. Yet here again the question presses: what does a popularizer do to the original? What did Paul do to Jesus, Shakespeare to Cinthio? The very plea, for instance, which Barfield makes for open-mindedness to Anthroposophy can show how difficult it is to strike a right balance on this question of derivation and originality. In the introduction to Romanticism Comes of Age Barfield calls explicitly for an end to prejudice against Steiner, and in Unancestral Voice Flume the scientist, Burgeon the spokesman, and the wonderful Meggid, who visits him with instruction and insight, repeatedly keep before us the value of thinking "without prejudice."4 One might feel that in Unancestral Voice Barfield continues to call attention to people's unfairness to Anthroposophy, the same unfairness which he specifically regrets in Romanticism Comes of Age.

Brief acquaintance with Steiner's writings, however, reveals that "open mindedness"5 is a virtue he especially values, and he means by it the "integrity of thought with which Natural Science is imbued" (28), a principle which he holds basic to the "method" itself of occult science. It is difficult, here, to separate or even clearly distinguish Barfield's special pleading for Steiner (whose ideas need to be approached with an open mind) from direct promulgation of Steiner (for whom open-mindedness is a kind of mental training). Nor is the point incidental, for Barfield has much to say in What Coleridge Thought on the value of a genuinely methodical approach to nature based on true scientific spirit. Barfield and Steiner, in short, share a conviction that the achievements of the scientific revolution can assist us in entering the realms of spirit. The "occultist knows," says Steiner, "that he can found no science without the integrity of thought with which Natural Science is irnbued" (25). Beneath a superficially innocuous gesture for tolerance we can thus detect an extensive foundation of shared thought.

So it is with a good number of Barfield's leading ideas: even when they appear as the speculations of an unprejudiced mind engaged in open inquiry, they can be found indebted to Anthroposophical teachings. For instance, Barfield and Steiner agree that in ancient times human consciousness was different, and we need to re-imagine the condition of past thought to know how the human mind experienced the world as spiritually vibrant and filled with a soul-life which we have grown gradually accustomed to locating within the human head. "When man received impressions from supersensible worlds in olden time," writes Steiner, "they felt like forces influencing and impelling him from an external spiritual world": for the primitive mind, writes Barfield, "there stands behind the phenomena, and on the other side of them from me, a represented which is of the same nature as me."6 Both men are concerned alike to impress on us that humanity in "olden times" experienced the world full of spirit akin to humanity's own spiritual nature. Of course, such participatory experience is unself-conscious, and with the growth and development of the human ego comes an increasing separation from nature.

There were, we learn, three periods of special importance in the evolution of ego: the moment at which the Christian era began, the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and the Romantic movement. The first is important, Steiner says, as the "center of gravity," the moment at which the true direction of man's evolution is revealed to man himself. The mystery of Golgotha shows that through the death of the body, spirit lives, and we discover the "true inner content"7 of our human story. With Christ, the human ego is reborn, achieving autonomy, but to a proportionate degree becoming shut off from direct participation in the worlds of soul and spirit (203). However, ego thereby is prepared to set out on the immense task of spiritualizing, by its own experiences and achievements, the outer world itself (310). Barfield frequently repeats this line of argument, insisting, for instance, that Christianity has enabled us to speak the word "I" in a uniquely authentic and responsible manner: "Had Christ not come to earth, individual human beings would never have been able to utter the word 'I' at all."8

Barfield agrees also with Steiner that vestiges of the old "participatory" consciousness remained in the thinking of the Middle Ages 9 but were banished with the rise of critical philosophy. The scientific revolution resulted, says Barfield, in a change in our "'reality principle' or common sense, or what you will.'"10 By this, he means that the polarity of subject and object achieved a high degree of clarity, that nature was disenchanted by the critical gaze of the rationalists and empiricists, and objects were held real insofar as they were found "hard" and measurable. Natural science, as Steiner puts it, "has banished from the field of sensible phenomena all that does not pertain thereto but is to be found only in man's inner being."11 In effecting this result, science has promoted the evolution of human consciousness to a point where the development now ought to precipitate a "backlash into perception of spirit," and, thereby, lead to "a methodical development of authentic inner experience.'"12

Steiner teaches that in the story of such a development the Eighth Ecumenical Council of Constantinople played a significant and unfortunate part. By promulgating the doctrine that man consists of soul and body, the Council dangerously modified an age-old teaching that human beings are constituted of body, soul, and spirit. A consequent insistence, in Western theology, on the body-soul duality encouraged an eventual, debilitating rationalist preoccupation with the dualism of mind and matter. The tertium quid, spirit, necessary to explain nature's transformation and man's interpenetration with nature, was suppressed. This theory is echoed also in Barfield,13 as is another highly particular idea of Steiner's, namely that the 1870s marked a crucial phase in the influence of the Archangel Michael upon human evolution in contention with the opposed but insidiously co-operative forces of Lucifer and Ahriman.14

Finally, Steiner began his career as a distinguished student and editor of Goethe, and in Romanticism found an appreciation of how, through imagination, the dichotomy of subject and object is to be overcome. Barfield retains Steiner's interest in Goethe, and has supplemented it with a study of Coleridge.15 But in Steiner alone among the authors he has read, says Barfield, there is a clear indication of how Romanticism must develop.16 In the very apprehension of the process of imagination as a means of overcoming the dichotomy of soul and body, the mind is beckoned to examine, systematically and clearly, its own spiritual, purely noetic activity.

How then are we to assess what Barfield adds to Steiner, if, as we now claim, the indebtedness is extensive and deep? First, it is important to point out that Barfield did not begin as an Anthroposophist, but had gone some way in exploring his own ideas on the evolution of consciousness before he encountered Steiner. The main lines of the story are clear in a lecture on "The Origin of Language": Barfield's distinctive interest in metaphor, lyric poetry, and the immaterial origins of language had arisen independently of Anthroposophy, in which he became interested in 1921 or 1922. For "quite a long time," Barfield tells us, the "two processes" (of developing his own ideas and of exploring Anthroposophy) "went on side by side," working upon one another, yet distinct. Consequently, despite the indebtedness to Steiner of a book like Saving the Appearances Barfield says it is "not an exposition of Anthroposophy, and because there is so much of the Subject's own in it, the full extent of its indebtedness is very likely not apparent. . . . The two are so inextricably mixed."17 One thing Barfield adds to Steiner is, therefore, simply the fact of an independent reflection on connections between lyric poetry and the evolution of language, and this leads to a second point, namely that Barfield is preoccupied with certain aspects of Anthroposophy more than with others. For instance, he all but ignores Steiner's social and educational theory and concentrates on teachings which lie on the border between philosophy and psychology. He is interested as we see, in the evolution of consciousness, but concentrates on its historical phase rather than, for instance, on the "Akashic records" which Steiner describes as revealed to spiritual perception,18 and which tell, among other things, of three incarnations of planet earth, of its development through embodiments designated as Saturn, Sun, and Moon, before arriving at its present phase, preceding the future Vulcan evolution.

A further difference which almost immediately strikes the reader who compares these two authors is the fact that Steiner is characteristically clear, explicit, and assertive at points where Barfield is not. Thinking should be "strong and vigorous and to the point,"19 Steiner says, and his writing strives for the requisite "wakefulness."20 He recalls, for instance, an inaugural lecture by a famous professor of literature and history. which concluded with the words "You see, gentlemen, I have led you into a forest of question marks."21 Steiner reflects: "I pictured it to myself: a forest of question marks! Just think: a forest of question marks!" The Professor's metaphor is evasive and obscure; by contrast, on hard questions Steiner is prepared to stand and be counted, and rarely fails to give an answer, even, at times, with dumbfounding explicitness. The human head, we are told, is "a transformed animal shape": it is the oldest part of the human body, and the rest of the human organism was added "at a time when the simultaneous development of the animals occurred."22 Seen from spirit land, "a red stone is experienced with a greenish and a green stone with a reddish hue." At a certain phase of evolution the physical body is "intermingled with a portion of the retarded Saturn nature, and here the activity of the Fire Spirits is at work. In what the Fire Spirits achieve in this retarded Saturn nature, we have to recognize the forerunners of the present-day sense organs of Earth men."23

It is not my purpose to call in question the content of such assertions, or to underestimate Steiner's stylistic range, only to confirm that, characteristically, as the founder of Anthroposophy for which he makes direct claims, he confronts us in this direct manner, even when his assertions challenge common sense. This is not to say he does not often write with compelling insight and real depth of understanding: indeed, coming to terms with antinomous responses--sceptical and enthusiastic--within one's self is the major challenge in reading him. Where, then, does one draw the line between assertion and suggestion? Characteristically, Steiner does not fudge.

With Barfield it is otherwise: he fudges all the time, and he does so as a literary man might be expected to, through metaphor and the subtle effects of language and structure. When Barfield presents us with challenging ideas, he tantalizes common sense in order to do so. He prefers not to assault it directly in Steiner's fashion, because he does not share Steiner's direct intuition of the particular geography of the spirit world, and he tends, as we have seen, to avoid those aspects of Steiner's teaching which seem insufficiently anchored in ordinary experience. In short, Barfield frequently relies on effects akin to the "forest of question marks" which Steiner abjured in the learned professor. The sensibility which early appreciated the "wonder" and "strangeness" of poetic diction 24 did not afterwards relinquish its fine-tuned responsiveness. In his introduction to The Case for Anthroposophy, Barfield admires "effective precision," but calls also for "requisite finesse" (21) and through this latter quality especially emerges what is distinctive in his writing. Here, for example, is Steiner describing sleep:

The astral body thus returns to its pristine home during sleep, and on awakening brings with it into life newly strengthened forces. All this finds expression in refreshment which a healthy sleep affords. As the further exposition of Occult Science will reveal, the home of the astral body is of far wider compass than the more obvious physical environment to which the physical body belongs. While as a physical being man is a member of the Earth, his astral body belongs to worlds wherein other heavenly bodies are contained besides our planet Earth. The astral body therefore during sleep, enters a Universe to which other worlds than the Earth belong. But this can only be made fully clear in the further course of our explanations. (Occult Science 61-66).

Here is Barfield in Unancestral Voice:

Their conversation had finished very late, and Burgeon, with his packing still to do and his brain too active, had hardly slept at all during his last night on board. Awakening next morning in his hotel bedroom, he realized that he had been making up for the lack. He felt the long dreamless night behind him, at first, as an enormous heaviness in his limbs which he should never shake off. And then, as that heaviness began to detach itself slightly, so that it was now something he could contemplate, instead of simply being it, he slowly came to realize, as he had never quite succeeded in doing before, the identity between precisely this heaviness and the recreation which was sleep. The hugeness of the one was the hugeness of the other caught, as it were, in the act; so that during the day that was coming the intolerable might of its oppressive mass would be the effortless ease with which his will would again inform those inert limbs, or with which (as long as they were passive) his mind would exploit their passivity for its own vigilance. There was, after all, no more mysterious transformation than this nightly one of the fagged and jaded into the active and energetic. How could one ever hope to understand the transformation of matter into heaviness of matter into the weightlessness of energy, without seeking also to penetrate this! For this was the transformation of matter into energy; only it was the inside of it. (104)

Steiner's description is directly informative: he tells us what happens when we sleep, and why, therefore, we are refreshed. He does not hesitate to proclaim the unfamiliar notion that we wander in other worlds, and that our astral body separates itself temporarily from our ethereal and mineral bodies. He promises further explanations, and when he gives them, they are equally precise.

Barfield's subject is, clearly, Steiner's, but Barfield's approach is different. For a start, we are listening here to Burgeon. a character in the book, and not Barfield himself. (There is little doubt, admittedly, that Burgeon is Barfield's alter ego. Indeed, a delicious printer's error confirms their collusion: in a conversation with Chevalier, Burgeon repeats a point with the words "'Believe.' I said." The text however reads 'Believe,' I said (97). The 'I' floats free from Burgeon, and rebounds upon its only begetter, the author.) Furthermore, Burgeon's reflection recreates, much more than Steiner's, something of our ordinary experience of being physically tired for lack of sleep, and then refreshed. Because Burgeon is himself in process of learning, it is appropriate for him to wonder about such things. Readers who are likewise unprepared for the full Anthroposophical theory are thus introduced to it by having their curiosity aroused, with Burgeon's. Also, the language is carefully tentative--"as it were," "how could one ever hope"--and continues to be so as it touches down upon a question of common interest: how is matter transformed into energy? The words in Barfield which perhaps are closest to Steiner's teaching on the astral body are: "or with which (as long as they were passive) his mind would exploit their passivity for its own vigilance." But it is doubtful if a reader of Unancestral Voice who did not know Steiner would feel the connection. Barfield rather is content to leave us wondering: indeed the meaning of the sentence in which this clause occurs is curiously inexact.

Or take the theory that humankind in ancient times thought and perceived differently. Steiner. Again, does not balk:

In the far distant past of which we are here speaking, the physical form and figure of man was as yet very different from what it is to-day. It was still to a great extent the expression of qualities of soul. The human being was of a finer, softer materiality than he after wards became. Where his members are now quite rigid. they were plastic, soft and pliable. A man more filled with soul and spirit was of gentle build, mobile, expressive. One who was less spiritually developed had coarser bodily forms. immobile. not so plastic. Improvement in the life of the soul tended to draw man's members together; such a man would remain small in stature. Backwardness of soul, entanglement in sensuality. came to expression in gigantic bodily proportions. While man was still in his period of growth, the body took shape according to what was growing in the soul--and this to an extent which must seem fabulous, indeed quite fantastic, to present-day ideas. (Occult Science 196)

There is something of science-fiction in this: indeed, Steiner would likely be undaunted by such a description, claiming only that his fictions are the result of direct intuitions of spiritual realities and are therefore not to be mistaken for just the adventure story kind.25

Here is Barfield dealing with the same issue:

Now if you are, or if you become convinced. that what we perceive is inseparable from how we think, which is the same as saying that the world around is inseparable from the way me think--though it is certainly not indistinguishable from it--then a lot of things follow. One of them is the privilege of discovering how very differently mankind as a whole used to think in the remote past. by that I do not mean simply that they did not for the most part think analytically logically causally. Many anthropologists and others have discovered that. without however making the discovery I am referring to. I mean that the thoughts themselves were images rather than concepts. And this entails that the world they lived in was different from the world we live in today. It would be as true, perhaps truer, to say that they perceived images as to say that they thought them. What we perceive as things they perceived as images, and it is this discovery  which enables us to grasp the distinction between the history of ideas and the history of consciousness. (History, Guilt, and Habit 69-70)

Barfield does not plunge in nearly so far as Steiner. The "remote past" is not specified, but seems to fall, roughly, within the time-span with which anthropologists also deal. Then we are asked to consider the difference between thinking in images and concepts: that is, modes of mental experience with which we are familiar. Characteristically, Barfield stops short of the crucial question: when does a difference in degree become a difference in kind! To follow his line of thought back to the state he describes as "original participation"26 would entail at some level a collapse of the doubly determinate structure of human knowledge dependent on the interaction of spiritual subject and material object. If the distinction disappears, so must the materiality which demarcates the subject. The inquiry thus would lead to something like Steiner's amorphous proto-men, but Barfield prefers not to follow it so far: he wishes rather to activate our curiosity about evolution of consciousness within a more confined arena.

In these examples, and elsewhere, Barfield is intrigued, like Steiner. by the mind's operations on the boundaries of cognition, but his way of handling the question is his own. There is. first of all, a characteristic fact, often manifest even in his sense of structure. For instance, in "Modern Idolatry, the Sin of Literalness,"27 the argument turns on the (by now familiar) idea that human consciousness in the past was different from human consciousness today, and we need, for our mental health, to know again the unity of mankind in the spirit. Such a state of consciousness, Barfield proposes, can be discovered by the patient education of historical imagination, especially through sensitivity to language combined with attention to etymology.

Barfield, however, is carefully imprecise. Once, he says, there was a "much closer interpenetration between thinking and perceiving than is the case today" (35), and people were once unable to experience a "merely 'outer' world" (46). He then asks: "What does it matter to us that our remote ancestors should have had a consciousness so very different from our own?" (47). The discussion, in reply, turns towards the fiction of "common sense." The words "much closer," "merely." and "so" are put hard (but unobtrusively) to work. They admit a relativism which we are not invited to interrogate too rigorously: rather, we are reined back to more immediate and empirical issues, for instance, schizophrenia, Hitler, and guilt feelings. Consistently, in some such fashion, Barfield awakens us to the peculiar mysteries of consciousness by causing us to encounter the self-reflexive operations of our own minds, and he keeps our curiosity alive by deflecting the discussion in insightful ways towards areas of everyday interest. It is as if the major claim, rooted in the occult,28 must earn its way in the world, just as the author must demonstrate he is no crackpot by showing himself a man of real practical insight. So we are played constantly, and one result is that Barfield's writings are full of a particular kind of fascination.

For instance, although "Modern Idolatry" begins by discussing a "kind of consciousness different from our own" (36), it moves quickly to assure us that of course this question is difficult, and patience is necessary if we are to get anywhere. By anticipating our skepticism, the author seems partly our accomplice, and yet he is not: by assuring us that he knows he is taking liberties with us, he can in fact proceed to do so with a certain assurance that if we still feel the urge to balk it is likely because of our own impatience. Barfield, in short, has a fine sense of how to keep his reader off balance, or, if you like, on the hook, and it is interesting to reconstruct how our reactions are manipulated. For example. when he discusses the difference between guilt and responsibility, at first he seems to distinguish clearly between them, and to champion the latter, saying that guilt about the past causes debility. By contrast, he goes on, "What was until recently called the white man's burden' was a burden of responsibility, not a burden of guilt" (55). The reader at once pulls up short: is our present guilt not better than the 'responsibility' of the colonizers who coined that wretched phrase! But in the next sentence we find our objection again anticipated: responsibility can of course be distorted into exploitation, but that is not how we are to consider its meaning just now. Rather, responsibility produces food for the will, guilt "food for the feelings only" (57) Feelings, we are to conclude, are as much a human reality as will, and must be given their place--especially to check the excesses of will. We are presented, here, with a distinction which at first seems striking and clear, and is then complicated into something subtle and razor-edged, calling for skill in balancing the claims of contending human motivations which need to be interpreted sensitively in particular situations. ''Will you please forgive me for jumping a gap'' (50), says Barfield at one point, as he switches from a discussion of Old Testament idolatry to schizophrenia. He then adds: "I intend later to recross it in the opposite direction, and this time in the ordinary way, by a bridge" (50)· The caveat makes explicit what is in fact a repeated rhetorical ploy: we are continually asked (or required) to make a leap of insight or imagination, and then are accompanied by a courteous gentleman who assures us, like the Attendant Spirit in Comus that he can walk as well as fly; that the stuntman's leaping across a chasm is not the only way to cross. though it would be a pity to make life wholly a pedestrian adventure. Moreover. the man who leaps perhaps makes possible the bridge by which others can gain more leisurely access.

But having things both ways at once, leaping and walking, does not (though it easily might) produce in Barfield's writings a mere tissue of compromises. In Unancestral Voice the Meggid archly notices Burgeon's fondness for aphorism (45), and one of Barfield's talents lies, indeed, in the phrasing of sharp definitions and challenging maxims. His writing, so frequently careful to balance weight with counterweight, has a characteristic firmness, and there is a sense often of having arrived at some resolution, some place to stand, however much we are caused also to feel that standing in one place is, in the larger scheme of things, a provisional respite. "The difference between an image and a thing lies in the fact that an image presents itself as an exterior expressing or implying an interior, whereas a thing does not"; "mythology is the ghost of concrete meaning;" "The origin of language is the self-gathering of mind within an already mind-soaked world"; "Power is of heaven. Strength is the faculty of applying it on earth"; Incarnation "refers to the whole world of nature, in so far as that is perceived through the senses."29 Concise and arresting sentences like these firm up the argument, even when it aims to render Rudolf Steiner's more challenging doctrines by indirection.

"The Harp and the Camera"30 is among Barfield's best essays. It compares the Aeolian harp to inspiration and the camera to imagination (albeit in a caricature form). Although Barfield deplores the extent to which ours has become a "camera civilization" (76) preoccupied with surfaces, he affirms that the line of development which has led to such technology is good and necessary.

Part of the attraction is that Barfield provides interesting information on the two elements which constitute his title, and in so doing makes clear that the overall structure of his essay is binary. He even draws our attention to this at the point of transition: "You may have been privately wondering when I am going to come to cameras" (65). Then, after he has dealt with the "camera sequence" (69), he proceeds, as we might expect, to bring the two strands of his inquiry together, first in a negative way, asking us to "contemplate for a moment the enormous contrast between the camera and the wind-harp, taken as typifying the process of perception'' (71)· The argument continues by stressing the differences between inspiration and our modern "camera consciousness,'' fascinated with surf aces and with ''projection'' and gazing (like Medusa and with the same results; 73) upon rather than into things. But the argument has another turn to take, and we are asked to consider not only the significance of a divorce, but also the possibility of "a true marriage'' between harp and camera. Can we project ourselves with imaginative joy into nature and thereby discover nature's spiritual being? Though different, harp and camera join forces, and the last of Barfield's quotations from the Romantic poets on the subject of harps is from Shelley, who begins by saying that man is like a lyre. and then continues: "But there is a principle within the human being. and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not melody alone. but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds or notions thus excited to the impressions which excite them" (67). It is hard to know what Shelley means by this, but Barfield is content to let the sense remain obscure, and turns to cameras. Then, at the point where he describes these as merely devices for reflecting surfaces, he says they are also in a way like imagination, though a caricature of it. Clearly, however, the camera is not imaginative. As with Shelley's comparison of men to harps, the images begin to blur, and we are asked finally to discover the truth somehow in a synthesis of the two incomplete but suggestive analogies.

Barfield thus remains appreciative of literary and artistic discretion, and of the fact that important meanings are caught and felt as subtle modifications in our habits of thinking-and-perceiving. and yet that readers can often be brought towards such appreciation by an arresting or bold comparison or contrast which is then qualified so that it intimates some elusive mystery of the human spirit. The style is, as a result, an intriguing mixture of clarity and suggestiveness, assertion and carefully reconciled opposites, of Anthroposophy (Steiner is alluded to in "The Harp and the Camera" 75) and more "mainline" reading in literature and science and the philosophy of science. And through it all speaks a finely-tuned voice, tentative, whimsical, and alive to the dangers of overexplicitness and the disappointments of mere provocation. It "struck me that";' "somewhere, I believe"; "perhaps not a bad image"; "whether there is any significance in that I shall leave you to ask yourselves": phrases of this sort keep the reader in touch, as it were, while the main argument proceeds, kept flexible by asides, and frequently enlivened by the incidental perceptions which such asides permit. Thus Barfield can hint at intriguing alternative routes the argument could take, as well as at some more massively coherent body of thought of which we are given glimpses.

Not surprisingly, the work in which Barfield addresses a non-Anthroposophical audience and yet expresses the widest variety of Anthroposophical ideas, is also the work where he is most plainly a literary practitioner. In Unancestral Voice the protagonist is Burgeon, who is visited by the Meggid, servant of the Archangel Michael, and instructed, through a series of encounters and arguments with various characters, in the truths of Anthroposophy. It is not hard to see that Burgeon is Barfield's spokesman, and not too much to claim that the Meggid speaks with the wisdom of Steiner. Nonetheless, Barfield does address us indirectly, and we participate in Burgeon's journey towards higher understanding through a series of arguments on such subjects as teenage vandalism, the penal system, D. H. Lawrence, Buddhism, historiography, and particle physics. Because the fictive structure is preserved, Anthroposophical teachings on Ahriman, Gabriel and Michael, on thinking without physical support, the developments of the I670s, and the Council of Constantinople are allowed to surface for our consideration, carefully placed in the dialogue so that our suspension of disbelief is encouraged while we are drawn, with Burgeon, to reflect on the boundaries of thinking and on what is implied by our encounter with them.

And yet the fiction is not quite granted autonomy. The work of a sixteenth-century Rabbi, Joseph Karo, lawyer and mystic, is picked up by Burgeon who discovers there the record, in diary form, of a series of visitations from a figure called the "Meggid." The historical curiosity of Karo's account, claiming to be an actual experience, helps to build a bridge (as Barfield intends it should) between the fiction Unancestral Voice and the world of fact. We are thereby discouraged from dismissing all of this as just made up. The technique of course is also Plato's, who employs the legendary, dead Socrates in much the same fashion. So too the numerous whimsical connections, delivered especially by the Meggid, receive their full flavor when we acknowledge how closely behind Burgeon stands Barfield, wryly aware of his own problems as an author: "Do not interrupt. Listen" (40); "Come, said the Meggid, you are not blind, but only ignorant" (60); "Whatever else I may accuse you of," says Chevalier, "it won't be of being a bore" (92); "At this point he [Burgeon] realized he was going too fast" (68); "He knew he could not speak of this without the risk of being avoided as a crank or a lunatic" (79). Such remarks combine good humor with perception of the difficulties involved in giving voice to challenging ideas. Fiction is one way of negotiating the difficulties, but we must be aware that fiction is a means to an end. Our initial resistance to bare assertion, however can be undermined imaginatively, and by the encounter with a quality of thinking which we respect for its learning, its awareness of human problems both current and perennial, its good sense and clarity, as well as for its literary accomplishment and ability to lead us to the edges of thought and thereby to the possibility of some direct experience of spiritual life. Barfield's skill resides in such a combination of effects, combined with a special tact in knowing where to stop: of how to accommodate his reading of Steiner to matters of current concern without activating anti-Anthroposophical prejudice. In so doing, Barfield is Steiner's most discerning disciple, but in the discernment lies a quality distinctively his own. It consists in part in a most teasing deficiency combined with a most provocative suggestion that he knows, and we can find out for ourselves, how that deficiency is to be repaired. Such deficiency, we might reflect, is an inherent characteristic of the beautiful: that in which we delight, but which draws us on.

Notes

¹ See Romanticism Comes of Age 7.
² Not surprisingly, a number of Barfield's academic commentators are members of English Departments. See for instance, Lionel Adey's C. S. Lewis's "Great War" with Owen Barfield; Patrick Grant, Six Modern Authors and Problems of Belief; R. J. Reilly, Romantic Religion, G. B. Tennyson, "Owen Barfield and the Rebirth of Meaning," Humphrey Carpenter's The Inklings confirms Barfield's place among literary men, and in "The Harp and the Camera," Barfield pays tribute to "that little group" of "Oxford Christians" who are the subject of Carpenter's study. For a range of critical opinions, see Shirley Sugerman, ed. Evolution of Consciousness: Studies in Polarity.
³ In Romanticism Comes of Age (12) Barfield notices Yeats' lack of discrimination about ideas: he "declined or was unable to look below the fitness of an idea for the special kind of lyric he was determined to write." Barfield has written poetry, though he is not well known for it.
⁴ Unancestral Voice 42, 44, 123.
⁵ See Occult Science: An Outline 20. Barfield describes the book as "the principal source book of anthropology" (Romanticism Comes of Age 18). See A. P. Shepherd, A Science of the Invisible: An Introduction to the Life and Work of Rudolf Steiner 20: "In all his teaching it is to the test of clear and unprejudiced thinking that Steiner appeals."
⁶ Occult Science 307; Saving the Appearances 42.
⁷ The Mission of the Archangel Michael 54; See also Christianity as Mystical Fact 166.
⁸ Romanticism Comes of Age 43. See also "The 'Son of God' and the 'Son of Man'" in The Rediscovery of Meaning 249ff.
⁹ For Barfield, see Saving the Appearances 71ff; "Science and Quality" in Rediscovery of Meaning 177. For Steiner, see Mysticism and Modern Thought 110. See The Redemption of Thinking: A Study in the Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.
¹⁰ History, Guilt, and Habit 34.
¹¹ Mysticism and Modern Thought 206. For further passages on the shift from "qualitative" to "quantitative" see Barfield, "The Form of Hamlet" in Romanticism Comes of Age 104ff; "Sicence and Quality" in Rediscovery of Meaning 176 ff; and in Steiner, see The Mysteries of the East and Christianity 20; The Case for Anthroposophy 59, et passim.
¹² The Case for Anthroposophy 36.
¹³ See Steiner, Michael 13, 80; Barfield, Unancestral Voice 102.
¹⁴ See Steiner, Michael 28, 45, 133; Barfield, Unancestral Voice 17, 39, 51 ff.
¹⁵ See Steiner, A Theory of Knowledge; Barfield, What Coleridge Thought.
¹⁶ Romanticism Comes of Age 15-16.
¹⁷ Owen Barfield and the Origin of Language"; see no. 2, 13-14.
¹⁸ See Romanticism Comes of Age 15-16 and Occult Science 105.
¹⁹ Ibid 246.
²⁰ Michael 125,
²¹ Ibid.
²² Ibid, 21, 20.
²³ Occult Science 84, 133.
²⁴ See Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning 171, 177, et passim.
²⁵ In "The Coming Trauma of Materialism," Barfield actually calls on the services of science fiction: "There is an opportunity here for a good book in the genre of science fiction by a really imaginative writer. . . ."
²⁶ Saving the Appearances, passim.
²⁷ In History, Guilt, and Habit 36 ff. Page numbers are cited in the text.
²⁸ The term is used in Steiner's sense, not "in the sense of secret--accessible only to a few, by special favor or good fortune"; rather as what is unmanifest in phenomena (Occult Science 26).
²⁹ See History, Guilt, and Habit 70; Poetic Diction 92; Unancestral Voice 69; Romanticism Comes of Age 162, 40.
³⁰ The Rediscovery of Meaning 63 ff; Page numbers are cited in the text.