G. B. Tennyson

Owen Barfield and the Rebirth of Meaning

With the appearance in paperback in the last three years of the two most important works by Owen Barfield the time is overdue for a consideration of his very substantial contribution to literary, historical, psychological, and philosophic thought. That no such consideration has hitherto appeared in an American critical journal constitutes a disquieting comment on the state of the academy today.

Owen Barfield is best known to the American public for his 1928 study Poetic Diction, a work revised again in 1952, and now at last available in paperback. As Howard Nemerov says in his introduction to the paperback edition, “among the few poets and teachers of my acquaintance who do know Poetic Diction it has been valued not only as a secret book, but nearly as a sacred one.” Secret and sacred are perhaps the key words to describe both the response Barfield has met with from readers and the areas in which Barfield himself is uniquely at home. His researches into the nature of poetry and inspiration have repeatedly taken him to the secret places of the spirit, from which he just as repeatedly returns with something close to the sacred.

A survey of his works begins properly with Poetic Diction since, even though it is his second volume in point time, it is his first in point of impact and critical relevance for readers likely to be reached by him at all. Accordingly I shall begin with it, but I shall also cover the other major works, omitting only a number of translations and editions, which are in any case not in print in this country.

Upon its first appearance in 1928 Poetic Diction attracted relatively little interest. A notably flaccid review in the Times Literary Supplement did pay honor to Barfield’s able treatment of the word ”ruin,” but in considering the whole burden of the book, the reviewer contented himself with a lame observation to the effect that the author’s theory of poetry was elaborated in an extensive essay “with much psychological and philological discussion.” Not much hint there of a book Barfield himself described as “not merely a theory of poetic diction, but a theory of poetry; not merely a theory of poetry, but a theory of knowledge.” That is what Poetic Diction aims to supply, and in large measure succeeds in supplying.

In Poetic Diction Barfield argues that poetry, the highest and loftiest poetry, augments not merely our sensation or our emotions of the moment, but our knowledge. Indeed, he goes so far as to question whether we really know anything by means other than that effected by poetry. Note, now, he is not saying that we learn only through poetry, but rather that the poetic process, the exercise of the Imagination, is the principal agent of knowledge. One need not search far to come upon a similar statement. Coleridge’s assertion that the Imagination is “the living power and prime agent of all human perception and . . . a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” is the statement most likely to be familiar to English-speaking readers. Barfield is an unabashed Coleridgean and latter-day Romantic. (Elsewhere he consider in a brilliant fashion the contribution of Coleridge to poetic theory and to epistemology.) But as much as he draws from Coleridge, Barfield draws at least as much from Goethe and other German Romantics, and from subsequent Continental thinkers, of which more later. The point about Barfield’s examination of poetic diction and the theory of cognition is that he insists upon approaching the problem whole, eschewing the analytic division into parts as fashionable in the past century of criticism. Further, he refuses to dispense with his own aesthetic perceptions. On the contrary these are the fundamental data with which Barfield begins. In his case, fortunately, the perceptions are exceptionally rich and sensitive. On the basis of the whole response, then--of mind and soul--Barfield avers that great poetry effects a “felt change of consciousness,” which constitutes the accretion of knowledge itself, for it is our apprehension of meaning. Meaning is thus available to us through the Imagination, because through the Imagination mind participates in Mind, through it one comes to “recognize significant resemblances and analogies.”

Because of the wholeness of Barfield’s approach it is difficult to subdivide his argument, and there is no question but that he supports his point “with much psychological and philological discussion.’ We can, however, see Barfield’s point more clearly when we recognize that it arises from a serious consideration of the nature of perception itself, in which he rejects the prevailing nineteenth-century scientific view and emphasizes instead the shaping role of human consciousness in perceiving reality. With Coleridge he stresses that we receive but what we give, and with Wordsworth that we half create the sensible world. This being so, the role of the individual psyche is vastly more consequential than it appears to be in a system that posits a static world of objects “out there” which our sense perceptions merely register.

Barfield’s rejection of the world of particles “out there” registering on the mind is also the key to his extraordinarily fruitful use of philology and etymology in support of his theory of knowledge. In Poetic Diction he tackles head on the vexing problem of the metaphoric and sensible nature of language; that is to say, the generally acknowledged fact, which etymology confirms, that words, including the most abstract words, all seem to return to metaphor, which in turn seems to arise from concrete and sensible perceptions and experiences. Since the days of Horn Tooke in the late eighteenth century, this knowledge has been used to attack the very possibility of knowledge and philosophy itself. Since spirit, so the argument runs, means really “breath,” and since “holy” means simply “whole,” or “well,” then Holy Spirit, say, means, if it means anything at all, merely a “whole or sound breath,” something we all may have. Such reasoning is very plausible. There is, of course, the common sense answer (and the one given to Horne Tooke by the Common Sense school of philosophy in Scotland) that, whatever their origin, words do not remain static and do not necessarily mean what they once meant (if they did, there would no such thing as etymology); therefore, whatever the etymology of Holy Spirit, or any other word or expression, it means something now other than the reduction to its primitive parts. It is the answer of usage, and must of course be acknowledged. Still we have the uneasy feeling that some not so holy spirit has been puffing up our words, breathing hot air into them. There is, however, a more satisfactory answer to the reductionist school, and Barfield in Poetic Diction has it.

Barfield brilliantly outlines the dominant theories regarding the origin of language and the development of metaphor. His exposure of their shortcomings is itself worth the price of the book. In brief, he points out that while theorists from Locke to Max Müller found ever more metaphor and ever more complexity of language as they examined the past, they did not hesitate to affirm yet an earlier period when everything was very simple, when so-called “root words” were grunted forth and then gradually built up into more complex words. Nor did anthropologists, coming into contact with myth, have any difficulty in explaining it as an attempt of the primitive mind to find “causes” for natural phenomena. In short, philologists, anthropologists, and hosts of others, put themselves in the position of primitive men and imagined what they would think in the same situation. Barfield exposes this bit of hugger-mugger for what it is: “the fruit of projecting post-logical thoughts back into a pre-logical age” (italics in original). He suggests that, contrary to popular theories, yet consistent with the proper method of historical examination (backward from the present into the past without ignoring the reality of one’s own aesthetic perceptions), language in the past had neither an exclusively sensible nor an exclusively abstract signification, but rather a word like “spiritus . . . or older words from which they had descended, meant neither breath, nor wind, nor spirit nor yet all three of these things, but . . . simply had their own old peculiar meaning” (italics in original). From this he projects a time in the past when human consciousness itself perceived reality in a way quite unlike modern perception, when meaning was, so to speak, perceived with a directness we have lost. This holds true for words, language, and myth, that “ghost of concrete meaning,” as Barfield calls it. “Connections between discrete phenomena, connections which are now apprehended as metaphor, were once perceived as immediate realities.” This early language may be called the first poetic diction. It is the reason that early writers like Homer seem to breathe a different air from ours. Later poetry must forever make meaning by getting into contact again with that original concrete meaning--for example, by “inspiration” or “breathing in.”

From Barfield’s insight into the nature of poetic diction and the nature of the mind of the past, whole armies of ideas and theories flow. Much of the rest of Barfield’s work is an elaboration and exploration of the consequences of his understanding of the origin and making of poetic diction and meaning. His earlier book, History in English Words (1926) gives more underpinnings to his ideas about the origin and development of words than there is space for in Poetic Diction. In the latter, however, Barfield performs a tour de force with the word ruin to reveal the “making of meaning.” By tracing the development of the word he traces the accretions and losses in its meaning and shows, in accordance with Horace’s observation, how meaning emerges from words in contact with other words; “for this “contact” with other words is the precise point at which the potential new meaning originally enters language” (italics in original). Ruin, from Latin ruo, . . . always retained the idea of movement, but this idea became increasingly less evident in the word while the newer static meaning, such as we now regularly perceive in the “ruins of a building,” became dominant. Spenser, for example, spoke of the late ruin of proud Marinell,” with only a hint of the rushing motion the word originally bore. Shakespeare reanimated it in the celebrated line, “bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” and even more in “the noble ruin of her magic, Antony.” And Milton consolidated its rewon vigor with “Hell saw Heaven ruining from Heaven.”

Barfield’s discussion of ruin (of which the above is the merest hint) is the full fruit of his earlier examination of hosts of words in History in English Words, although it must be allowed that nowhere does he so thoroughly penetrate to what he calls the soul of a word as he does in Poetic Diction. But what the earlier volume does reveal, as we look back on it from Poetic Diction, is the nexus in Barfield’s thought between semantics and the understanding of the past. In History in English Words he repeatedly brings forth not only the vanished meanings of words and their long and interesting development in the language, but the vanished world of the mind that these words and thoughts open up to our inspection. To take an example almost at random. in Barfield’s treatment of the medieval humours one can get more immediately and more succinctly the meaning of the theory of humours for the consciousness of the medieval mind than from all the (usually condescending) expositions of the typical class in medieval literature. But then Barfield is ever a sympathetic student of the Middle Ages.

The imaginative indwelling in the mind of the Middle Ages (and periods before and after) does Barfield yeoman service in the two works that followed Poetic Diction--Romanticism Comes of Age (19440 and Saving the Appearances (1957). Setting aside Romanticism Comes of age for the moment, I should like to consider Saving the Appearances. Apart from Poetic Diction it is the work most likely to appeal to a wide audience, and appropriately it is the second of Barfield’s books to be published inexpensively in this country. In this quite dazzling display of Barfield’s imaginative and synthesizing powers we have a work that exposes the clay feet of a multitude of contemporary idols. Fittingly, the book’s subtitle is “A Study of Idolatry.”

In Saving the Appearances, Barfield abandons the essentially literary focus of his previous work to concentrate first on the psychological, and specifically on that relation obtaining between human consciousness and the world. Then he proceeds to philosophic and religious aspects of various world views. Perhaps the most cherished notion that his investigation calls into doubt is the assumption that human consciousness has not changed at all, certainly not during anything we could call the historical period. It is already evident from the consideration of Barfield’s earlier books that his study of language suggests otherwise. To cite but one example, Barfield has already argued (in History in English Words) that such expressions as that which described one’s bowels as moved by compassion (or, one may add, Coleridge’s fatal situation from Isaiah, “Wherefore my Bowels shall sound like an Harp”) were at one time not merely figurative but real; that is, persons (like Isaiah) who used such expressions did so because they truly depicted the state of their psyches and their bowels. if this be true, and if at the same time we no longer have any such sensation and therefore no longer any need for an expression for it, it can only be that our awareness in this instance is quite other than Isaiah’s. Multiply this instance by the thousands upon thousands of similar instances that the history of language reveals and one must conclude that our very consciousness itself differs radically from the consciousness of medieval, even more of ancient or Biblical, man. That, in turn, being so, how grossly must we misrepresent men of the past!

Barfield, equipped as he is with a profound understanding of the consciousness of earlier epochs, avoids the common misrepresentations; but more than that, he enables us to see what it was like to live with a “participatory consciousness,” which is his term, along with “participation,” to describe the way in which epochs from the Greek through the medieval conceived the world. There is a beautiful passage in C. S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image that conveys something of the way the medieval mind grasped reality, the passage that speaks of the medieval cosmos as the “revelry of insatiable love.” One cannot keep from thinking that even so brilliant a critic as Lewis (who was a close personal friend of Barfield’s) may have helped in his understanding of that mind by Barfield’s superb disquisition on the same theme. In Saving the Appearances Barfield asks the reader to imagine for the moment that he is a medieval man, thinking ordinary everyday thoughts:

To begin with, we will look at the sky. We do not see it as empty space, for we know very well that a vacuum is something that nature does not allow, any more than she allows bodies to fall upward. If it is daytime, we see the air filled with light proceeding from a living sun, rather as our own flesh is filled with blood proceeding from a living heart. If it is night-time we do not merely see a plain, homogeneous vault pricked with separate points of light, but a regional, qualitative sky, from which first of all the different sections of the great zodiacal belt, and secondly the planets and the moon (each of which is embedded in its own revolving crystal sphere) are raying their complex influences upon the earth, its metals, its planets, its animals and its men and women, including ourselves. We take it for granted that those invisible spheres, not the individual stars (as Shakespeare’s Lorenzo instructed Jessica, much later, when the representation had already begun to turn into a vague superstition). As to the planets themselves, without being specially interested in astrology, we know very well that growing things are specially beholden to the moon, that gold and silver draw their virtue from sun and moon respectively, copper from Venus, iron from Mars, lead form Saturn. And that our own health and temperament are joined by invisible threads to these heavenly bodies we are looking at. We probably do not spend any time thinking about these extrasensory links between ourselves and phenomena. We merely take them for granted.

By contrast, Barfield notes, if we were to reverse the procedure and put a medieval man inside our skins, he would no doubt see objects, for the first time as it were, three dimensionally, and would be impelled to say, “Oh! look how they stand out!” For the point is really that we all have representations. And the idols of modern man are in very truth our representations, which, because of the history of modern thought and the spectacular development of science, we take to be realities, indeed the only realities, all drained of any meaning.1 Ptolemaic astronomy, despite what popular lecturers still tell us, never pretended to be describing the phenomenal cosmos as Copernican astronomy does. Rather it was intent on “saving the appearances,” that is, accounting for the apparent movements in the heavens. The scandal of Copernicanism was not so much that it accounted in a different way as that it asserted that its theory was a phenomenal reality, or, as Barfield puts it, that it offered “a new theory of the nature of theory.” The planets became, not representations of an underlying reality, but reality themselves--they became idols. The rest of the phenomenal world followed in rapid succession. Now everything became “out there,” going on of its own accord, and we mere observers: “The earlier awareness involved experiencing the phenomena as representations; the latter preoccupation involves experiencing them, non-representationally, as objects in their own right, existing independently of human consciousness. This latter experience, in its extreme form, I have called idolatry.”

But Barfield, first-rate iconoclast though he is, is not concerned only with smashing the idols. He is concerned also with what to put in their place. This aspect of Barfield’s teaching is the most difficult to explicate and the most likely to baffle the average reader. First of all, Barfield does not urge a return to the past, despite his desire to recover the riches of meaning that were once so immediate to consciousness. He urges instead that we move toward a new stage of consciousness that unifies subjective and objective, that reweds that divorced couple, science and religion, and makes possible again a contact with meaning. Here Barfield’s teaching draw most heavily on that of Rudolf Steiner and is for that reason both alien and suspect to the English-language reader to whom Barfield is primarily speaking; for Steiner’s name is coextensive with the concept of anthroposophy, a word Barfield ruefully doubts that “the mother tongue will ever really manage to assimilate.2 Although Steiner’s teaching is implicit in much of Saving the Appearances, once is best introduced to Steiner and Barfield’s understanding of him in the slender volume Romanticism Comes of Age, published by the Anthroposophical Society explicitly for the purpose of introducing English readers to anthroposophy.

Romanticism Comes of Age, being a coterie publication, is rather more opaque to the average reader than Barfield’s other works. Therefore one hesitates to affirm much about what appears--partly because of the vocabulary--as rather esoteric thought. A reader not already seduced by Barfield’s other volumes had best not press on to this one. But anyone who has been will find much of value here. There is first of all Barfield’s unfailing readability. Even when he is talking such matters as the Fourth Post-Atlantean age (admittedly he only mentions once) he writes absorbingly. In fact, Steiner fares better at Barfield’s hands than at those of most of his disciples, who too quickly become lost, or let their readers become lost, in the “etheric’ or the “astral body,” or some other arcane Steinerism. Barfield can bring all of this off with the persuasive plausibility. But more than that, Romanticism Comes of Age offers several essays that are vintage Barfield: two pregnant treatments of Coleridge, a luminous essays on the form of Hamlet, and a fine treatment of the inspiration of the Divine Comedy. That all of this is intimately bound up with Barfield’s longtime devotion to Steiner, far from diminishing what Barfield says, actually constitutes the strongest endorsement of anthroposophy one is likely to meet with. If it brings this kind of insight to Barfield, there must be a good deal to it, although one also suspects that Barfield is unduly humble about what he has brought to anthroposophy.

In the fifties and sixties Barfield has turned increasingly to a new mode of writing, but one that approaches similar issues as those dealt with in the more straightforward treatises I have already discussed. He has moved into the mode of the dialogue and the quasi-fictional story. His earliest such excursion is This Ever Diverse Pair (1950), published under the pseudonym of G. A. L. Burgeon. Reviewing this work Barfield’s friend C. S. Lewis called it “high and sharp philosophic comedy,” and predicted for it the status of a “small scale classic.” He added that he “wished it longer--which shows, perhaps, that it is the right length.” Such, one may observe, is true of all three of Barfield’s imaginative excursions. This Ever Diverse Pair is an adventure into what Walter De La Mare calls the “less private” life of an English attorney through the device of an alter ego. The public face is that of Mr. Burden, the private one of Burgeon. These two are curiously at war and curiously forever encountering personal moral dilemmas. This aspect of Barfield’s writing (especially the ingenious ending he contrives for the story) is a refreshing, down-to-earth one. It is encouraging to encounter a writer with Barfield’s philosophic and historic sweep who is not at the same time oblivion of the brute fact that we all still live everyday lives--every day. A dividend in this little book is the chapter “The Things That Are Caesar’s,” which I, mostly on guesswork, take to be a portrait of one aspect of the late C. S. Lewis.

In 1962 Barfield published a more ambitious work in his later vein, Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960’s. Here his knowledge and sympathy find a wider range than in the rather more private This Ever Diverse Pair. The entire book is a dialogue among eight participants, one of whom is Barfield’s standby Burgeon, “a solicitor with philological interests.” It is here that Barfield confronts the increasingly acute problem of communication among specialists of differing backgrounds and interests. He creates a weekend symposium, composed chiefly of academics, with a working scientist or two thrown in, each of whom represents a dominant trend in contemporary thought. There is the positivist, the humanist, the psychiatrist, the Catholic, and so on. What is exciting about Barfield’s treatment is that the collisions and fireworks are intellectual not social. Only occasionally for continuity do we hear anything about what the principals are drinking or eating or doing when they are talking. And the talk is so good that this is how it ought to be.

To set off his own unorthodox views Barfield chooses for his symposium participant spokesmen for the most influential opinions of our time and lets Burgeon expose the weaknesses in their thought or in their underlying assumptions. It is especially the assumptions that engage his attention. What do we take for granted and what does this reveal about our view of the world? These are the questions that occupy Burgeon/Barfield. Many of them he had already examined discursively in Saving the Appearances, but here all is done in the form of a witty and fast-moving Socratic dialogue, with Burgeon as a very disquieting Socrates working on the assumptions of the physical and biological sciences. For example, Burgeon maneuvers Brodie, a professor of physical science, into, if not an admission of the absurdity, at least a recognition of the difficulty, in constructing hypothetical pictures of the world before the appearance of man, since such pictures necessarily include qualities (dependent on interpretations of sense impressions) which science has demonstrated to be purely human. In other words, Barfield is again in pursuit of the fallacy of project postlogical thought into an age of prethought, and, at a further remove, of assuming the generation of mind from an equally assumed mindless universe. Burgeon also take off in fully cry after logical positivism, linguistic analysis, psychoanalysis, and other assorted idolatries. His treatment of the sex-obsession of the Freudians provides an especially telling example:

Suppose—suppose a complete ignoramus, with some reasoning powers, introduced into a centrally-heated house. He looks through all the rooms one after another, fiddling idly with everything he sees but understanding nothing. At last he finds himself in the bathroom. He turns on a tap and hot water comes out of it. Hooray! Here at last is something he can understand. obviously the whole heating-system must be named and interpreted in terms of bathtap. What else could it be? The kitchen-boiler is repressed bathtap; the radiator that warms the drawing-room and the great hall and the staircase are sublimated bathtap; and the airing cupboard is so dry, because it is busy trying to pretend it has nothing to do with bathtap. As to the origin and explanation of it all. Isn’t it obvious that it all grew out of a bathtap? Isn’t it obvious that anyone who says otherwise, says so because he has been shut up in an airing-cupboard, where he couldn’t see even the pipe, let alone the bathtaps, because of all the clothes and fine linen cluttering it up?

The book abounds with such little treasures. Another, of a different sort, is the disclosure of the probably origin of the old query about angels on the head of a pin, but the reader should discover this for himself. More important is the condition that Barfield is trying to lead the reader to see, which is the condition that human consciousness has presently reached, where it came from and where it may be going. Although this is, as ever, the central point, it is one that I prefer to leave to Barfield’s own skilled hands to set forth, just as Burgeon in Worlds Apart leave it to Sanderson, the retired schoolmaster, to set forth to the participants in the symposium.

The most recent of Barfield’s works to appear is Unancestral Voice (1965).2 The mode here is between the novel form of This Ever Diverse Pair and the dialogue of Worlds Apart, but in this work Barfield has moved beyond the confines of a symposium or even the relation between two aspects of one mind. Burgeon appears again, as a lawyer at retirement age (Barfield in real life retired from the practice of law at about the time of this book). He comes to experience a kind of voice, or power, or intelligence within himself and to communicate with it for his own intellectual growth, and hopefully the reader’s. The “voice” is called the Meggid, a name adapted from a seventeenth-century Jewish cabbalistic philosopher’s “voice” (the Meggid); and it comes to Burgeon for long and short sessions during which it alternately utters cryptic brief statements (“interior is anterior”) or engages in lengthy discussions. Anyone who has not followed Barfield sympathetically before this book will be hopelessly lost by the presentation of “spirits” as “transforming agents,” but anyone who has the least sympathy for Barfield will be enthralled by Unancestral Voice.

Barfield uses the literary devices he developed in his two earlier imaginative works--the interior dialogue (here the conversations with the Meggid) and the symposium (in this case, set on a ship bound for South Africa). The two mutually illuminate each other, not in a direct and obvious way, but rather round about, obliquely, as dreams cast light on waking life. Moreover, this book, like his other imaginative works, simply bristles with good talk, stimulating ideas, new slants. Where else can one find an acute and fully modern intelligence discussing such matters--and showing their relevance--as the Photian heresy, second dentition, pre-Edenic matter, Teilhard de Chardin, transformation, courtly love, and the quantum theory?4 And all held meaningfully together! How it is done is almost impossible to divine, for by rights this book should be chaotic and confused; and yet it coheres. There are of course passages of crystalline clarity. Barfield has sharpened his depiction of the conflict between science and religion, at times through rather severe criticism of the Church, which, one would think, has already had enough from other quarters. The book ends with the transcription of an arresting lecture purportedly by a young physicist who presents a case for a new direction in which science can move. There is also at the end the revelation of the true meaning of the Meggid, but only a Barfieldian will appreciate that.

A writer as various as Barfield does not lend himself to easy summing up. To say that Barfield seeks the recovery of meaning is perhaps too backward looking a formulation of what he is urging. He seeks, to be sure, the recovery of meaning but only by going forward, by “transformation,” a key Barfield word. This involves recovering much that has been lost but in a new way consistent with modern thought and consciousness. Thus Barfield is concerned to recover a meaning once available through participation, but he is concerned in recovering it to gain something more, by reaching a new stage in participation; for he knows that, in the old sense, Pan is dead. His promulgation of the new way--final participation--a way extrapolated from Goethe and Steiner, is both harder to fathom and harder to transmit at second hand. Surely this is a failing, however understandable it may be in the light of the inherent difficulty of Barfield’s teaching. There is some danger that the reader in taking the grain and throwing away the chaff will not choose as Barfield would have him choose.

Few could be more aware of the dangers of failing in his mission than Barfield himself. Romanticism Comes of Age records, among other things, the blank reception he met with as he tried to propagate the gospel of anthroposophy. That may account for his very discreet references to anthroposophy and Steiner in other books, and for the entire absence of Steiner as a consequential figure in Unancestral Voice. Even without mention of Steiner and anthroposophy, however, Barfield’s teaching is bound to have hard going. In Worlds Apart Burgeon asks Brodie, the physical scientist, what will happen to him for advancing his iconoclastic notions:

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There are times when Barfield’s projections of the future state sound curiously utopian, as though he truly saw the New Jerusalem coming to England’s green and pleasant land. Since, however, he professes himself a Christian, and indeed treats Christian thought with a seriousness hard to match--especially among modern churchmen--one must conclude that the tone of secular apocalypse that insinuates itself into what he says of the future is a function of the highly colored prophetic vocabulary he has inherited from Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy. Barfield’s value lies in his theory of poetic diction, of the history of language, and his concept of the evolution of consciousness, especially if the latter is kept in bounds and not made the excuse for a rampant optimism. Anyone who has experienced that “felt change of consciousness.” Barfield talks of in regard to poetry knows that Barfield is on solid ground here. Such a person also should know that Barfield’s theory of language and language origin is much more satisfying than what usually passes muster. It has the further surprising advantage of slipping neatly past Occam’s razor, which the elaborately contrived alternate theories hardly do. One’s awareness of that felt change of consciousness can also be the start of a participation in Barfield’s view of the consciousness of earlier epochs. Once one has experienced the knowledge that comes from seeing an earlier form of thought flash up in poetry--when Heaven ruins from Heaven, for example--one is on the way to seeing that earlier periods thought differently, and that perhaps the difference between then and now is not only historical but evolutionary.

Although these are Barfield’s immediate concerns, ultimately he is talking about science and religion. From the theologians Barfield has received some attention and, I venture to believe, will receive a good deal more. It is no accident that his writing flows with traditional religious metaphors and similitudes. They key word for his concept of transformation is the Logos; this is also they key word for is views on science. He writes in Unancestral Voice, “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.” Another key concept is that of rebirth. Unless, Barfield seems to be saying, consciousness be born again, it will never attain the kingdom of heaven. It is this rebirth that both recovers past meaning and makes it new.

1 There are, of course, those who have always sought to enter imaginatively into other eras, and I am not suggesting that Barfield s the first man to recommend such a procedure. But a personal experience I had recently brought home to me how rare Barfield's attitude [seeking to “enter imaginatively into other eras”] is in these enlightened times. I was attending a lecture with a varied but exclusively university-oriented audience of some five hundred when the lecturer, a Ph.D. in physics. said, almost in passing, "Remember that only three hundred years ago men actually believed the world was flat!" Considerable knowing laughter greeted this astonishing misrepresentation (or, should I say, falsehood?), and the assembled all murmured a kind of self-congratulatory hum of satisfaction with their own superior knowledge. At another point the lecturer dropped a reference to the onetime belief that the sun revolved around the earth. More laughter. The physicist, it was apparent, was merely offering burnt incense at the altar of some of our twentieth-century idols.

2 Perhaps the mother tongue will have difficulty assimilating more than just the word anthroposophy. The concept behind it is exceedingly difficult to define. Usually rendered as “wisdom of humanity,” anthroposophy is in effect the philosophy or doctrines of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). Steiner was for a time at the turn of the century associated with the theosophical movement headquartered in England. Thus, like theosophy, anthroposophy (term was coined by Steiner when he broke with the Theosophical Society) places considerable stress on speculative mysticism as an avenue toward understanding the divine, and it cultivates the development of higher faculties of the mind toward this end. But, unlike theosophy, anthroposophy emphasizes even more the study of mankind as an avenue toward understanding the nature of the world. From Steiner anthroposophy drew heavily on Goethe’s scientific theories. Perhaps the blend of theosophy and Goethean science is best expressed by Steiner’s own term for anthroposophy: “spiritual science.”

3 Since this article was written another book by Barfield has appeared, Speaker’s Meaning (1967), the published version of four lectures delivered at Brandeis University in 1965. This book now constitutes one of the best introductions to several of Barfield’s areas of interest, especially to his thought on history and language. Wesleyan University Press has also undertaken to publish other Barfield works and four of these are now available from that press. Also, Barfield’s 1925 children’s book, The Silver Trumpet, has recently been published in a very handsome format (Grand Rapids, MI: William Barfield. Eerdman’s Publishing, 1968).

4 For the curious, the differences between Barfield and Teilhard de Chardin are more notable than the similarities. Burgeon notes that Teilhard tries to reckon with history “according to his lights, which are not mine.” Both men of course confront the assertion of a mindless universe, but Teilhard does do with many more obeisances to modern science and much less apparent concern for morality. Barfield is almost completely free of Teilhard’s evolutionary determinism, he assigns a central role to the Incarnation, and he is considerably more attentive to the problem of individual choice. In short, while it would be instructive to compile a list of heresies for both thinkers, they would not be the same heresies.