Notwithstanding Owen Barfield's comfortable walking in many disciplines--philology. philosophy, literature, science, law (not to mention his substantial body of fiction and poetry)--the one discipline into which he articulates all others is Christian apologetics. His persuasive arguments in behalf of meaning and its return to its rightful center--man and his earth--have their roots in a transforming Christology, one commensurate with our time, our stage in the evolution of consciousness. Barfield tells his readers in "Philology and the Incarnation" that, as a philologist, he arrived at the truth of the Logos. not with any theological preconception, but because it was simply there--the logical conclusion of his labors. Moreover, he said if the Christ event was not a reality, he would have found it necessary to invent such a reality.1 He believes that for any meaningful future of mankind, all the disciplines, particularly the sciences, must consider and answer to "the incarnation of the Word." Modern physics, he feels, is arriving at this truth in its quest for stable entities, since such a search depends less and less on equations, on constructive models, and more and more on "cultivating a mode of thought that is capable of grasping the relation between whole and part," as the physicist, Flume, reminds his fellow physicists in Unancestral Voice, "or," continues Flume, of "a mode of space itself which we have not yet apprehended, leading us perhaps to the source from which space itself originated."2 But to accomplish this, scientists must re-think their methods. They must understand themselves as participants in nature and not merely as lookers on nature in order to once again discover her inner life. for to find the qualitative in nature is to best understand the quantitative. It is when men seek to integrate--rather than disintegrate--the three powers of being--physical, psychological, spiritual--that true advancement and discovery will occur.

Modern physics has arrived at the necessity either of thinking about a "psyche-physical cosmos"3 or of abandoning the hope of finding the laws behind chance, randomness and probability in its search for stability Physicists especially are obliged to consider the transforming principle whose laws govern man himself as well as his universe. As the Meggid informs Burgeon in UnancestralVoice:

"There are other laws of nature besides the regularities which the brain of man has hitherto detected in her. There are the laws on which transformation itself depends. II is to these that they must come at last. whatever further regularities they may unravel on the way. if they seek in the only place that will be left to them- the place where transformation actually occurs [in the life of human will]. . . . It is there alone that true transformation can occur. there that you must look al last . . . for the transforming agent. . . . true transformation can come only from a transforming agent that transforms itself. and that it is to the 'laws' of that- self-transformation that the phenomena said to be governed by chance point your inquiry." (Voice 154-55)

Once men, physicists especially, come to realize that thinking and willing are not mutually exclusive, once they come comfortably to think man's relation to the cosmos, the methods are already in practice. For the Meggid, as for Barfield, all transformation springs from one source: the cosmic Christ. Barfield reminds us in Saving the Appearances

. . . if the Christ infuses my whole man, mind as well as heart, the cosmos of wisdom, with all its forgotten truths, will dwell in me whether I like it or not; for Christ is the cosmic wisdom on its way from original to final participation.4

Modern man has all but forgotten that he can say I am because at the dawn of evolution, he was first spoken forth, so to speak. "Human consciousness," says Barfield in his commentary on Coleridge, "begins with that polarization of unity into sameness and difference, on which 'likeness' is based"; and the "Logos" becomes, "by imperceptible gradations, also logos or human reason."5 Unless men of the sciences in particular become conscious of the essential unity in "difference." and look to regain that inner unity of spirit and matter, unless men come to regard their respective disciplines as concomitant to a new Christology, the true evolution of consciousness cannot progress toward final participation in "cosmic wisdom." Barfield says elsewhere in Saving the Appearances: "there will be a revival of Christianity when it becomes impossible to write a popular manual of science without referring to the incarnation of the Word" (Appearances 164).

This new direction in thinking to which Barfield points us is not easy. Ingrained habits of empirical thinking, brought about by the philosophies of Descartes and Comte, by the scientific research of Lyell and Darwin, are not easily dislodged. Barfield is well aware of this dilemma in modern thinking. Repeatedly he exposes the fallacies in such empirical modes of thought. Our modern way of thinking is a result of the ousting of spirit from matter in Cartesian philosophy and its culmination in Darwinian biology. Descartes, with his "diremption of mind and matter,"6 doomed the long held view of a dynamic interaction between man and his universe and opened the door to a mechanistic view of nature which still infects scientific thinking. This obfuscation of the essential unity of all nature, which the empirical approach to existence insists on, has led to the hypothesis (now taken as fact) that only the observable can be measured, that only the quantitative is accessible to objective scientific study. Any approach that would necessitate qualitative measurement is outside the domain of objective inquiry of any sort. In short, to distinguish has came to mean to dis-unite. Things qualitative have become for most of us strictly subjective in value and therefore not measurable. The relativism which that assumption has bred is best seen in the value we attach to the neologism amoral. In an unpublished essay, "Language, Evolution of Consciousness and the Recovery of Human Meaning," Barfield considers particularly the damaging results of such faulty assumption and seeks to return proper balance by showing the meaningful interpretation of subject-object. "It was in the process of naming nature," says Barfield, "that man became aware of her and therefore no longer merely a part of her."7 What modern man has forgotten is that such a process was, and is. a process of distinction and not separation. All objective inquiry requires a perceiving subject. When men come to understand once again the necessary interaction between subject and object, between the immaterial and the material, between quality and quantities, there will be a recovery of human meaning. "We have spent three or four hundred years," says Barfield, "learning to perceive the subjective ingredient in all that looks so very objective; the task now, for the sciences as well as the humanities, is to learn to perceive the objective ingredient in all that looks so very subjective."8 Barfield has long seen the nineteenth-century Romantics as having been aware of this needless diremption of man and nature and of the need for redress, but believes they failed to systemize their thinking adequately. Romanticism, for Barfield, comes of age in the works of Rudolf Steiner.

His debt to Steiner, he says, is a great one; yet (as Steiner would insist), Barfield is nonetheless his own thinker. In Steiner's works, Barfield found his own thinking verified, his own thoughts taken far beyond the horizon of his own vision. Steiner surely advanced his theological thinking, but Barfield's contribution to the philosophy of culture through his long and careful study of language, his compiling of evidence against the tacitly-held assumptions culturally inherited, and, indeed, his penetrating insights into the philosophy of Coleridge. suggest Steiner's thoughts are the undergirding of his own rather than their source. Barfield more directly attacks the ever Increasing materialism of the West, which he sees as suffocating man by cutting him off from the spirit and thereby atrophying his creative Imagination, his only source for regeneration and reunion with nature herself, his own unconscious being. The life-force, which Steiner calls "etheric," and the reverence of which Albert Schweitzer insisted on, is the one unitive power that all but shouts for recognition. Unless modern man is able to rethink materialism, to revitalize it, he and his world are doomed--a condition that is becoming more and more self-evident, with the sharp rise in mental illnesses (schizophrenia in particular), the fast depletion of natural resources, and the extinction of various species growing at an alarming rate.

It is in Barfield's refutation of the Cartesian dichotomy of mind and matter and the Darwinian view of a mindless evolution, that Barfield convincingly argues for the desperate need to rethink our passively accepted views of man and his relation to language and meaning, to nature, and to history. With Ernst Cassirer, he argues an absolute immersion (participation) of early homo sapiens in nature (an environment from which myth and language arose), in a time when man and nature were spiritually united and therefore uniquely one, a time when man was still unconscious of the phenomena as outside himself, as other than self. Such participation is evinced in the study of myth and language. This evolution of consciousness, imbedded in the history of language, is intrinsic to a biological evolution of man. In "Two Kinds of Forgetting," Barfield reminds us:

For some time now a number of thinkers, of whom Ernst Cassirer is probably the best known, have been pointing out that there is really no question of speech having originated in the responses of tool-using organisms to an already established environment. an environment which we should recognize as our own if we could be spirited back into it. On the contrary, the world about us--the only world we can perceive and know--came into being along with language, of which it is at least as much the effect as it has ever been the cause.9

It was home sapiens in the course of a long evolution who first perceived and named his phenomena; therefore, it is unthinkable for us to assume that we can construct a primeval universe, a world of flora and fauna, before the first perceptions of homo sapiens--or with like perceptions. It is folly to assume, as Lyell did in his theory of "Uniformitarianism that early man, with his "extra-sensory link" to his world, saw the phenomena as we do today. We not only "think differently, but the phenomena . . . themselves are different" (Appearances 34-35).

In History, Guilt, and Habit, he says:

When we study consciousness historically, contrasting perhaps what men perceive and think now with what they perceived and thought at some period in the past, when we study long-term changes in consciousness, we are studying changes in the world itself, and not simply changes in the human brain. We are not studying some so-called "inner" world, divided off, by a skin or skull, from a so-called "outer" world; we are trying to study the world itself from its inner aspect. Consciousness is not a tiny bit of the world stuck on to the rest of it. It is the inside of the whole world. Or, if we are using the term in its stricter sense--excluding therefore the subconscious mind--then it is part of the inside of the whole world.10

Barfield takes this observation further in "Man, Thought and Nature," when he finds it perplexing that men who "have the idea that the whole configuration, colour, appearance and cohesion of nature depends on Thinking," also "have the idea that this Thinking is no more than a kind of a flicker going on in a corner of the brain." For such "Thinking on which our experience of nature depends, really is in--objectively in--nature--and is not a kind of searchlight beam proceeding from a magic-lantern in the human skull"; for the "'mind'," Barfield continues, "as Steiner himself once put it, 'is related to thought, as the eye is to light.' Everyone accepts the very special relation that exists between eye and light. but no one suggests that light is simply something that goes on in the eye." For Barfield, as for Coleridge, Goethe, and Steiner, "Thinking  . . . permeates the whole world of nature and indeed the whole universe."11 In view of this, the evolutions--biologicaI and mental--are one. There can be no biological evolution without the evolution of consciousness. Once men readily accept this, they arrive at the logical conclusion that human consciousness arose out of the unconscious and not out of matter as Darwin assumed. Mind precedes matter. As the Meggid cryptically remarks "interior is anterior" (Voice 45).

Barfield emphasizes this point repeatedly in a variety of contexts. In an unpublished essay, "Evolution," aimed at scientists, he penetrates to the very core of the fallacy in our thinking:

an unprejudiced contemplation of [the history of language and meaning] compels the abandonment, not only of Darwinism as a satisfactory account of the origin of human consciousness, but also of those other two steps in the development of Western thought, of which it was the culmination . . . namely the Cartesian dichotomy between mind and matter and the uniformitarian hypothesis of eternally unvarying laws of nature. Because sooner or later a certain truth is brought home to you. to which nearly all your contemporaries are blind. I mean the fact that mind or consciousness is not the function of an organ, though it makes use of organs--the brain among others; that it is not a mysterious something spatially encapsulated within a human or animal skin; that it is the inner side of the world as a whole. just as a human mind is the inside of one human being. You may prefer. in that context, to call it "the unconscious," but whatever you call it. you know that, though ii makes sense to inquire how and when consciousness developed into what we now experience as such, it makes no sense at all to inquire how and when mind emerged from matter.12

Steiner employs a useful analogy to make understood the emergence of matter form spirit: "in the Earth's life," he says,

The material evolves out of the spiritual; until then. the spiritual alone existed. . . . the spiritual . . . as time goes on, partially condenses, so to speak. to the material. . . . it is very much as though we might be looking at a vessel filled with water, where by a finely regulating cooling process. lumps of ice were gradually taking shape. We see the ice condense out of what was water through and through. Similarly . . . we trace material things. events and entities condense. as it were, out of a how the previous existence which was spiritual through and through. Similarly . . . we trace how the material things, events and entities condense, as it were, out of a previous existence which was spiritual through and through. . . . Everything material connected with the planet has condensed out of what was once united with it spiritually. . . . Even throughout Earth's material evolution, the spiritual always remains the guiding and directing principle.13

Once men grasp the significance of "the spiritual" as the "guiding and directing principle," proper balance between matter and spirit will be restored; and man will have found his place once again in nature.

Barfield does not suggest a return to original participation but an advancement to the conscious participation in nature, which will point to final participation in "cosmic wisdom." For this to take place, man must rejuvenate the power of his own imagination. As unconsciously figurative language evolved to man's consciously metaphoric use of that faculty of the imagination, so man must now exercise that intuitive ability to re-invest matter with spirit. Because willing and thinking are two sides of the same coin, men must learn how to apply these mutually inclusive activities. Today. more than ever before, man is the victim of materialistic literalism. Unless he activates the poetic imagination and re-creates the relation between himself and nature that is there, evinced in the very language he uses, he and his earth will sink deeper into an already mechanistic existence. To brook this tendency to self-destruction the disciplines, and the sciences in particular, must seriously endeavor to research the source of the transformational force behind all being, and therein recover the wholeness of existence. It is only when we recover wholeness that the parts become meaningful.

If such re-thinking does come about, then Barfield's major thesis, a transforming Christology. will be duly served. For without the awakening of the poetic imagination common in all men, without its being the nursery of symbol and representation, men will continue to have "Eyes that see not, and ears that hear not." Men and the Church in history must accept "the possibility . . . that revelation of the mystery of the kingdom was not turned off at the tap when the New Testament canon was closed, but is the work of an earth-time" (Appearances, 176, 184-85).14 Man is now at the stage in the evolution of consciousness that either he prepares his mind to be the vehicle through which the ground of all Being reveals wisdom, or his search for Meaning--be it cosmic, historical, social, political, theological--is fruitless.

For many, Barfield is, to echo C. S. Lewis, the "wisest and best" of "unofficial teachers."15 He is a "Meggid." His aim is nothing short of reawakening us to the necessary wholeness that lies behind our fragmented world, a world which we have created for ourselves by our insistence on separateness, thereby setting adrift the categories from their essential mooring: the wholeness of reality. Like the Meggid, Barfield leaves his listeners wiser; they know it. And if that ever-increasing, newfound wisdom is to have meaning, it will bring about--as it must--a change of consciousness first felt in the hearts of individuals, and through them, a change in the grand heart of Humanity itself, and its unconscious being, Nature.

Barfield leaves the thinking up to us. His works are not  convenient blueprint on how to think ourselves off the horns of our present dilemma. Nor are they meant to be a panacea for our present ills. They are a corrective to our ways of thinking; they are pointers to those creative forces which wait on our own cognition. One is reminded of the creative force of Barfield's influence in C. S. Lewis' prefatory tribute, The Allegory of  Love:

Above all. the friend to whom have dedicated the book, has taught me not to patronize the past, and has trained me to see the present as itself a "period." I desire for myself no higher function than to be one of the instruments whereby his theory and practice in such matters may become more widely effective.

Indeed, Barfield leaves the thoughtful reader changed. The least he does is to scrub the mind clean of complacency.

NOTES

1 The Gordon Review 8 (Spring 1965). 139.
2 Unancestral Voice (1965; rpt. Middletown, Ct.. Wesleyan Univ. Press. 1966), 143. hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Voice.
3 "Self and Reality." Denver Quarterly 6 (Spring 1971). 24.
4 Saving the Appearances A Study in Idolatry (1957; rpt. New York: Harcourt. Brace and World, 1965). 185; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Appearances
5 What Coleridge Thought (Middletown. Ct.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1971). 164, 163. Dinstinction-in-unity: Polarity, is a key word in Barfield's writings as it is in Coleridge's.
6 "Evolution," Towards 2 (Spring 1982): 6-16.
7 Essay delivered at a symposium sponsored by the Charles F. Kettering Foundation in cooperation with Teachers College, Columbia Univ., Woodstock, Vermont, June, 1980.
8 See also Chapter 4. "Subject and Object in the History of Meaning," Speaker's Meaning (Wesleyan Univ. Press. 1967).
9 The Nassau Review, 4 (1981). 5-6.
10 History, Guilt, and Habit (Wesleyan University Press, 1979), 18.
11 Romanticism Comes of Age (1944); rpt., Rudolf Steiner Press, 1966), 227-28, 226.
12 See also, Ch. 4, "Subject and Object in the History of Meaning," in Speaker's Meaning (Wesleyan University Press, 1967); and "Self and Reality," cited above.
13 Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science, trans. George and Mary Adams (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1969), p.104.
14 See also "The Concept of Revelation," JAAR XLVII/2 (June, 1979) in which Barfield discusses the relation between religion and literature in the light of revelation.
15 C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), the Dedication.