In Saving the Appearances, Owen Barfield shows how the Parable of the Sower embodies a hidden wisdom discernible only to those spiritually ready to receive it. This wisdom calls for the use of the imagination to break the spell of idolatry of materialism then just beginning to arise, and for the conscious participation in the process by which the unknowable substratum of material reality becomes configured in the human mind as a comprehensible world.

To achieve such "final participation" the adept must cultivate not only "goodness of heart" but "a steady furnace of the will." The acquisition of such an unbending intent has been achieved in a number of different ways, and is frequently triggered off by some crisis that demands a highly intensified commitment to the spiritual requisitions of the culture.

Barfield and Lewis act as complementary guides to this process, Barfield as philosophic expositor, and Lewis, in spite of doctrinal misgivings, as a creator of visionary fables that reflect, to a greater or lesser extent, the characteristics of a consciously participated process by which a more ideal world is created.

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The prime object of Barfield studies, for some of us at least, must surely be the understanding of and even perhaps, at some remote point, the attainment of final participation. And I should emphasize that it is the importance of the subject that has encouraged me to share some findings on this quest. My choice of topic does not, in any sense, imply the deep expertise and the even deeper experience that would qualify one as an authority on the subject, rather than as a explorer in search of the answers my paper might stimulate. And of course, the topic deserves a conference to itself, to begin to do it justice. Anyway, in the time available, let me make a few points for starting up discussion, and suggest some lines of thought for future explorations.

Let’s start our discussion of final participation from where Barfield left off in Saving the Appearances, that is the last chapter, on The Mystery of the Kingdom. It’s a chapter, I find, whose contents never fail to astonish and baffle any conventional notions of what one might expect to find in the gospels. The essential point seems to be that the parables teach things that have been hidden from the creation from the world. The message of the parables is offered to all, but only a few of the hearers will have the capacity to understand its full meaning. Specifically, the parable of the Sower can on one level be simply taken to mean that the effect of a sermon will differ according to the capacity of each individual to comprehend and respond to the message. But there’s more to it than this fairly unsophisticated observation. The Sower sows the Word. And the term logos, word, has a most special supercharged sense in Greek philosophy as it does in the Christian gospels. We have only to think of the creating Word at the opening of John’s gospel. So the deeper comprehension, as Barfield shows, goes beyond the surface meaning to involve some kind of fundamental transformation, no doubt on the level of the spiritual rebirth which Jesus assured Nicodemus is an essential preliminary to entry into the Kingdom.

"He that has ears, let him hear!" Is there really some secret wisdom for those who have the ears to understand? The apostles had no doubt and frequently alluded to the fact that they were preaching an utterly new gospel. St. Paul for example wrote to the Corinthian church that "we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification."

But Paul also writes that since they are as yet babes in the faith, he can only give them the milk of elementary instruction, for they are not yet ready for the meat of the deeper spiritual doctrines. For the wisdom of this world is but foolishness with God.

Nonetheless, paradoxically, it seems that the difference between these different levels of instruction lies not so much in the message, the content, but in the degree of spiritual perceptiveness in the hearers, whether they be sarkikoi, that is carnal hearers, of the flesh, or psychikoi, on the psychic or soul level, or pneumatikoi, on the highest level, of the spirit. This, of course, exactly reflects the situation in the gospel parables where the parable is the same for all, but the challenge to the hearers is to develop the spiritual ears to comprehend the deeper meanings. Jesus’ private explanations to the disciples seem like exercises in helping them to develop such insight, which he confidently sees them as attaining. In Barfield’s terms, "Only those in whom the seed has already sprouted, in whom the stirring has taken place, can benefit by any explanation." Such are the one’s who Jesus, in Mark’s account, he has just called to be his disciples.

For it seems that, in a certain sense, imagination has become a primary virtue, "the one thing needful." Or so Barfield, following Blake, would persuade us. (SA 161-2). (I remember that when Ron Brady and I were propagating Barfield in Berkeley in the sixties, we were obliged to cultivate a sense of "Barfield-Readiness" as a criterion for which academics would get a copy of Poetic Diction or even Saving the Appearances thrust upon them, with the instruction to read, mark. learn and save at least their intellectual souls. And it was not always the most prestigious who displayed the requisite "readiness" to make that imaginative leap of faith into a new view of reality.)

But for a Barfieldian, the development of such a capacity for comprehending final participation must presumably be a primary and overriding goal.

But where does Lewis come into this? Morris and Wendling, in their marvelously lucid article, "Coleridge and ‘The Great Divide’ between C.S. Lewis and Owen Barfield" concluded: "In Coleridgean terms they were polar opposites. But Barfield’s subjectivism was in Lewis, as was Lewis’ objectivism in Barfield." On a simple level, the complementary nature of their apostleship is clear enough. Lewis is the "apostle to the sceptics," with his sane and forceful use of logic reinforced by homely and effective analogy in such works as Mere Christianity. It is he who gives the milk, the elementary instruction to those who are not ready for the deeper spiritual understanding that Barfield provides. Moreover, one notes that with Pauline orthodoxy of method, Barfield bases his interpretations on the extant texts, the existing testimonies. He does not rely on the esoteric traditions and occult revelations of Mu or Atlantis that support so much of the interpretations of Rudolf Steiner.

Let us take a closer look at Lewis’ role in this apostolic complementarity. St. Paul makes it clear why it is that the Corinthians can only understand his teaching on the elementary or infantile level. You are not ready, he says, "for you are still of the flesh (sarkikoi), while there is still jealousy and strife among you" (1 Cor 3.3). In every mystical tradition, this is insisted on, that adherence to the basic rules of human morality and conduct are a non-negotiable pre-requisite.

In other words, it seems we’d better be pretty well grounded in the way of life set out in Lewis’ Mere Christianity if we hope to get very far with the profounder wisdom of Saving the Appearances. Indeed, all that book, and most of what Lewis wrote, could be read as a necessary preparation and propaedutic for Barfield’s elucidation that "both within and without the established churches, a new impulse towards final participation has gathered strength, as men have attempted to make the Pauline maxim: ‘not I, but Christ in me’ a living experience." (158)

But Barfield also warns us against the kind of contamination that can occur to perception even within, it would seem, final participation itself, "in an age when . . . both the good and the evil latent in the working of the imagination begin to appear unlimited." (145.) It’s clear that some kind of preliminary purification is necessary. On the psychic or soul level Steiner’s Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment gives thorough and subtle guidance to the purifications required prior to experiencing the deeper wisdoms, and particularly for the balancing and fine tuning of the "three soul forces" will, emotions, thought. He also distinguishes lucidly the dangers of plunging into these realms with soul forces unbalanced. An excessive predominance of will manifests itself in a violent nature, "rushing from one unbridled action to another," in behavior all too familiar today in such characters as Jones of Jonestown, Koresh of Waco. Excess of feeling can lead the seeker into "unlimited dependence" on others, and "the most pitiful vacuity and feebleness." Excess of thought develops into a coldly "contemplative nature, hostile to life, and enclosed within itself"-–an all too characteristic perversion of contemporary academic life in an age pervaded by idolatry of the material world (135).

The pre-requisites for attainment of final participation, Barfield tells us, is not only the "goodness of heart" that such purification should produce. Once these arduous preliminaries have been mastered, we need to achieve what he terms "a steady furnace in the will." (161) Steiner’s "Conditions of Esoteric Training" include a formidable fifth section on "Steadfastness" (Knowlege of the Higher Worlds 76, 78). "Nothing," he says, "should induce the student to deviate from a resolution he may have taken, save only the admission that he was in error. Every resolution is a force, and if this force does not produce an immediate effect at the point to which it was applied, nevertheless it works in its own way."

How does one acquire this quality of "unbending intent"--to use Carlos Castaneda’s phrase from his conversations with Don Juan? There are obviously a great variety of ways, some not fully dependent on our own control. Carlos himself has listed many of them, erasing personal history, breaking established routine, setting forth into the desert to encounter directly manifestations of spiritual forces normally as unsuspected parasites within our own deeper being. (See especially his Journey to Ixtlan.)

But for those of us who can still lay claim to any literacy, a clearer understanding of unbending intent as well as a very practical preparation is a reading of those texts within our deeper culture that embody that quality. One would prescribe a course of reading of such works as Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, Beowulf, the Commedia, Paradise Lost , Pilgrim’s Progress, all of which portray heroes who in a myriad of different ways are of just that character. Then, to understand our own situation, where heroes of unbending intent are scarce on the ground, one would read something of the directionless, intent lacking heroes of later literature, Rasselas, Endymion, Byron’s Don Juan, etc., as well as the heroes who manifest unbending intent towards their own destruction, Faustus, Captain Ahab, Conrad’s Kurtz of The Heart of Darkness. Then in our own age, whose shattered imagery provides us no relief in the Wasteland, lost in the maya of 20th century existential materialism, one would study the lives and works of Lewis and Barfield, and not forgetting Steiner, as themselves Rediscovering and Rehabilitating a meaningfulness in existence that once more merits and stimulates a life of Unbending Intent.

How would we recognize final participation if we should happen to experience it. Barfield describes it in Saving the Appearances (161) in these terms : "The world of final participation will one day sparkle in the light of the eye as it never yet sparkled early one morning in the original light of the sun." This sounds like a very definite experience. Owen himself one said to me that he had never personally experienced final participation, and most regrettably I never pressed him on that. I suspect he had had much the same experience that most of us have had at some time or another, the kind of experience, perhaps, that Lewis writes about in Surprised by Joy. One of my own experiences was quite amusing. One Sunday in the sixties I was sitting in a quiet spot on the Berkeley campus absorbed in Dante’s Commedia. On an impulse, I looked up from the book and saw that the buildings around me had undergone as astonishing change. Photographically, as it were, they looked the same, but now each building, each tree or plant was glowing with its own particular meaning and character. I could see the significance of everything I looked at in a fashion that was qualitatively different from anything I had ever experienced before. Now about half an hour before this incident I had been down on the notorious Telegraph Avenue to get a coffee in some typical student-haunted dive. So for a moment it struck me that some smart fellow had decided to propagate the drug revolution by lacing my coffee with LSD. But then I realized that the experience I was going through represented no distortion of everyday reality but rather an intensification which brought out the meanings normally concealed by the idolatry of a world dominated by a materialistic consciousness. And it was absorption in Dante not a drugtrip that was responsible for this transient experience of final participation. In fact, what the drugs essentially do, it would seem, is to anaesthetize that part of the brain that holds our present materialistic consciousness, enabling us to take a trip back into something not too far off primal, original, consciousness. And to get a glimpse of it, may I incidentally recommend a read of Amos Tutuola’s unbelievably vivid account of that frenziedly beautiful world in his book My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Safer medically and legally than the other route, and just about as convincing.

Perhaps this slight incident can give us further insight into Lewis’ contribution to the advance, if that’s the word, of final participation. Some passages from Surprised by Joy suggest that Lewis himself may have had final participation experiences. Certainly, his fictional works suggest as much, as do such theological essays as "Transpositions." The Pilgrim’s Regress, for example, has John the pilgrim base his whole life on an attempt to find the way to a mysterious island of a sweet, piercing Joy, of which he had visions in his youth. At the end of a series of intellectual adventures he finally takes the plunge and becomes a Christian. He then finds that the way forward is paradoxically the way back, a "regress," towards the Landlord’s house which he fled from at the beginning, but instead of taking a wandering route, this time he finds a straight path, "a knife-edge between heaven and hell," a good image for the life of unbending intent .

Similarly, in the last of the Narnia stories, The Last Battle, after the destruction of the old Narnia, the children find themselves in a new country similar to but infinitely more splendid than the old. Most of the chapter "Further up and Further In" could in fact be regarded as a gloss and an expansion of Barfield’s previously quoted description of the world of final participation. Lewis sums it up: "The new one was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more. I can’t describe it any better than that; if ever you get there you will know what I mean." The Great Divorce, and Till We Have Faces have descriptions of such places, one in the style of the medieval allegorical vision, the other in the style of ancient myth. All of Lewis’ descriptions can be regarded as literary invitations to recognize and experience final participation. As a contemporary reviewer put it "he evangelizes through the imagination."

I have attempted to sketch out a few personal answers on a subject on which I would gladly be better informed. Many of the most important questions I have left completely untouched. For instance, the question as to the extent to which final participation is culture specific. One can rule out Christianity being its exclusive vehicle from Barfield’s and Lewis’ own words. But is Christianity its primary vehicle, or is it only one among a potentially unlimited number of vehicles? How does it relate to the varieties of religious experience from the visionary to the mystical. Is it a subspecies or is it a place where many different types of spiritual experience converge? Is the participated state something that is occasional, as other mystical states, or could one lead a complete life in that mind-state? And would it be a very different one than life today which increasingly falls under the domination of the technological demons we have summoned up to save us from tasks that seem to be more comfortably handled by increasingly intricate mechanisms? Above all, what are the hindrances that block what would seem to be a natural evolution into final participation at the present time?

What Morris and Wendling have referred to as the "integrity and completeness" of the Barfield-Lewis relationship seems now to me much more evident than when I first took up this line of thought. But, to return to a metaphor favored by both of them, don’t look at the finger, look at what it’s pointing at. And as good Barfieldians or Lewisians, that indeed would be the best way of honoring the heritage they have left us.