My topic, “Owen Barfield, Rudolf Steiner, and Anthroposophy,” will probably strike people as bolder than large, although it is far from small.  Nonetheless, I should like to offer an explanation of why Barfield looked to anthroposophy rather than to mainline theosophy for corroboration of his own literary and linguistic researches.  It is bold, first, to take on Owen Barfield and, second, to do so in the academic world, of which Barfield, speaking as an anthroposophist, does not have a very high opinion:

            Many anthroposophists attach little or no importance to the academic milieu.  They feel it is too far gone in arid in­tel­lectualism.  They hold --and I think agree with them--that, if anything like a break-through occurs in the accep­tance of Spiritual Science (and surely there must be such a break-through before long, if our civilization is to survive) it will not be in the academic world where it first appears.  But I think it must be important that the mes­sage, and the legacy, of Rudolf Steiner should have its representatives, in book or in person in the academic world as well as elsewhere.2

Although today “arid intellectualism” is the least of the ills which plague the academic world, it still has the effect of mak­ing any real topic bolder than it would appear in better times.

Barfield’s importance exceeds his reputation, and probably always will, because truly seminal minds seldom become popular authorities with large academic followings.  Genuinely original minds more often oppose rather than lead their contemporaries.  It is doubtful that Barfield will ever command as large an audi­ence, say, as Jacques Derrida, because Barfield does more than reflect the condition of his audience by verbalizing their materi­alism.  Some readers may not know very much about him, let alone his marginal mentor Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy, and may wonder what Barfield has to do with recent developments in literary criticism?  The fact is a great deal, because the style of thinking Barfield has sought to correct is precisely what has so sadly eroded the academic study of literature, to the effect that criticism, when it is not biography and gossip, now reads like a blend of bible tract and political pamphlet.

          If Barfield is recognized at all, it is often only as one of “the Inklings, the Romantic Theologians,”[3] as he calls them, that group of Oxford dons which included his better known and life-long friends C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams.  But for all his colleagues’ popular achievements, Barfield remains the more seminal mind, the more traditional philosopher, and by far the more important critic.  In particu­lar, his two key works, Poetic Diction, A Study in Meaning, and Saving The Appearances, A Study in Idolatry, dwarf the combined efforts of other twentieth-century literary critics.  These two brief studies stand alone, because they are grounded in and extend what William W. Quinn has recently described as the “the only tradition,” that is, that body of universal metaphysics also called “the primordial tradition,” “the perennial philoso­phy,”[4] or, for that matter, just “theosophy.”  The rediscovery of traditional thinking, as Barfield himself remarks, “has been itself a discovery marking the last few decades.”[5] To be more specific, in grounding himself upon a fresh restatement of uni­versal principles, Barfield is able to explain rather than merely to exemplify the unconscious epistemology which has driven most recent literary theory.  Such a claim is by no means as bold as it may sound.  But, be that as it may, if literary criticism is to escape the naive verbal nihilism into which it has fallen, it is necessary to understand the literary implica­tions of Barfield’s updating of “the only tradition.” This translates into explaining why, as he himself has put it, his impact has “outlasted some books by men who knew a great deal more of literature and of the history of ideas.”[6]

          In brief, what makes Barfield original and has enabled him to succeed where others have failed is his introduction of the evolution of the mind into the study of language and literature.  Young readers especially sense that this is the road to follow.  As a result, criticism need no longer be limited to a naive ex­pression of the materialism which has increasingly dominated Western thinking.  From a traditional point of view, the pro­gress of twentieth-century literary criticism, that is, its blind drift away from universals toward particulars, through the rapid and well known succession of structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction and postmodernism, etc., represents a predictable ontological development of rational materialism into an irrelevant linguistic atomism.  Barfield’s effort to undo this “dragooning of the human spirit” through an “abortion in the womb of language”[7] has had more academic influence than it first may appear, especially as he himself notes, among undergraduates, in spite of their professors,[8] and it is important to know why.

          Why has Barfield succeeded in becoming the peculiar academic influence he has, and in some places even more of a cult figure than his fellow Inkling C. S. Lewis, when others, such as Ananda Coomaraswamy and René Guenon, let alone the earlier Helena Blavatsky, who have said the same kind of perennial things about literature, language, and the evolution of consciousness, have not?  To explain Barfield’s success, it is necessary, I think, to take a step back and to begin with the world outlook he encountered as a young man, that is, to look at Barfield’s own development and, in particular, to trace the route he took back to the traditional metaphysics of “the only tradition.” 

          At the heart of this development lies what might be called an epistemological felix culpa--new knowledge growing out of the experience of ignorance.  As Katherine Hilliard pointed out at the beginning of this century:

            One of the most interesting signs of the times is the interesting tendency of conservative thinkers to feel their way cautiously into what seems to them a novel line of thought, but which to those accustomed to . . . [traditional] teachings, appears to be a very slight deviation from the ordinary conceptions of life and death.  It is nevertheless always an advantage to see what we call truth, and perhaps even self-evident truth, put in new and tenta­tive form, so that we suddenly awake to the perception of possible outlines that we had never seen before, as when a much-belated spring like the present gives one glimpses of rugged mountain sides and abrupt cliffs through the deli­cate tracery of the half-opened leaves, that had been hid­den in other years by the luxuriant foliage of summer.[9]

This paradigm applies to Barfield.  As we shall see, in spite of the fact that “the only tradition” was accessible to him from a variety of sources, Barfield followed the kind of idiosyncratic if providentially fortuitous route described by Hilliard.  He happened to be drawn to the perennial philosophy through what he took to be the new ideas of Rudolf Steiner and his anthroposophy, rather than through the mainline theosophy as it was re-introduced into the West by Blavatsky, or for that matter through his contemporaries and predecessors like Ananda Coomaraswamy, G. R. S. Mead, M. F. Cornford, the Cambridge Platonists or even the emerging Kierkegaard, and so on.[10]  It is true that he was, later in his career, drawn to the romantics, especially to Coleridge, and thus to “the only tradition” as Coleridge also sought to revive it.  In this oddly eccentric connection to the work of Rudolf Steiner, however, lies the key to Barfield’s cur­rent academic appeal.  The roots of his attraction to Steiner reach into his own peculiar “personal equation,” the terms of which involve his being young and English in the early decades of this concluding century.

          In order to describe the context of Barfield’s attraction to Steiner, it is first necessary to digress, in order to dis­tinguish anthroposophy from theosophy--and this involves untangling another mare’s nest of misinformation and misunderstand­ing.  Great ignorance surrounds theosophy proper, which has out­wardly never been a single monolithic movement.  Like American Protestantism, theosophy has broken up into numerous sects.  The original and genuine theosophy re-introduced by H. P. Blavatsky in 1875 was intellectually rigorous, devout yet spiritually dis­ciplined, and utterly unlike the numerous and merely psychic counterfeits of nineteenth-century spiritualism and its contempo­rary equivalents in the so-called “new age” movement.  Here a little history does indeed go a long way.  In the 1890’s Annie Besant’s faction split from the original group, which remained loyal to theosophical principles and, it should be noted, dis­banded in 1938, primarily on the grounds that the twentieth cen­tury was a lost cause.  Besant’s faction in turn split again into three or four main schismatic groups, Adyar in India, Point Loma in California, Wheaton in Illinois, and the United Lodge in New York City.  And while this breakup was going on, Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) came on stage and founded his own version of “the only tradition,” which he called anthroposophy.  The upshot of these competing “theosophies” was that theosophy in general got a bad name, and this bad name, as we shall see, contributed to Barfield’s preference for anthroposophy.

          Anthroposophy is a uniquely German (Austrian) movement, and it is best to let the genuine theosophists speak for themselves concerning the difference between this movement and their own, which turns on the psychism of the first and the spiritual dis­cipline of the latter.  In spite of many superficial similarities, a great gulf separates the two organizations.  Á propos of this distinction, however, the German scientific writer Bernard Bavink once remarked, that as far as theosophy goes “what is new is not true, and what is true is not new.”  His theosophical reviewer accepts this truism, but carries the matter further.

            For the benefit of readers unaccustomed to the Theosophical Quarterly, who may think that every reference to ‘theosophy’ is synonymous with a reference to The Theosophical Society, and that theosophy is to be bracketed  lightly [identified with] with Mr. Steiner’s organization, we hasten to assure Mr. Bavink that we feel just as he does about ‘theosophists and anthroposophists’.  But in spite of his strictures, and like so many of his countrymen, he [Mr. Bavink] is attracted toward psychism.[11]

The reviewer’s use of the term psychism--the current term is “channeling”--is clearly pejorative.  Psychism  describes “any dabbling with the hidden laws or forces of the psychic plane for any material end ¾ including bodily health ¾ or for the grati­fication of the desires or unhealthy curiosity of the personal­ity.”[12]  In plain language, the reviewer condemns any organiza­tion which focuses its energies in the recognizably gray area of “new age” activity, which does not rise far above the level of old fashioned black magic.

          In today’s academy, the fine distinction between two admit­tedly obscure movements such as anthroposophy and theosophy on the basis of psychism may seem to deserve Ockham’s razor, since it appears to contribute nothing to the understanding of Barfield’s growing importance as a philosopher and literary critic.  The relevance of this distinction becomes apparent, however, when it is expressed in more familiar terms.  In a word, the theosophical objection to Rudolf Steiner is precisely that his brand of “theosophy” is too materialistic and encour­ages a fatal, Nietzschean confusion between things genuinely spiritual and the sicklier appetites of the flesh which dis­places truth with mental excitement.  In academic terms, Steiner’s anthroposophy is Dionysian rather than Apollonian, insofar as it aims at an intensely here and now sense of life expressed in terms of health, wealth, and happiness all at the expense of spiritual development, elsewhere and otherwise.  This is not to say, however, that anthroposophy is unscientific, merely because it focuses too much upon the psycho-biological level of experi­ence.  On the contrary, the theosophical objection to anthroposophy is not aimed at its methods, but at the locus of their application.  In a word, that it is misdirected “Spiritual Science.”

          Now, I am not accusing Barfield with dabbling in any kind pseudo-occultism of table-tipping, seances, or their up-dated equivalents, such as transcendental meditation or channeling, etc. ¾ quite the contrary; nor am I condemning anthroposophy for producing nothing worthwhile.  I am rather suggesting that there was something, some combination of subject matter and approach, in Steiner’s anthroposophy (as opposed to Blavatsky’s rigorous and perhaps threatening theosophy ) which the young British in­tellectual found congenial, perceived as answering to his own questioning, and therefore was attracted to.  If we look to see what this something was, we discover two qualities in Steiner’s work which piqued Barfield’s interest.  We will see, first, Steiner’s supernatural (and evolutionary) view of reality and second, and what might seem surprising, his empirical, rather than a mystical or dogmatic approach to this reality.  These two polar qualities of reason and imagination, as Barfield calls them, and his own capacity to combine them enabled him to pre-serve yet to expand his cultural tradition of British common sense materialism.  As he reports:

It is because I have found that capacity in Rudolf Steiner, and because I have not found it elsewhere, that I am bound to regard his as the one fundamentally ‘contemporary’ mind that the first two-thirds of the twentieth century has pro­duced.[13]

This attraction was obviously strong enough to overcome the stigma then attaching to any form of theosophy in our techno­logical century.  Steiner enabled Barfield to have his empirical cake and eat it too, that is, to preserve and to refine his own solid view of the world and to do so “intelligently.”

          Barfield in fact came upon Steiner after he had written his first book Poetic Diction.  Writing at a time when behaviorism held the status of religious dogma and was paradoxically denying the mind as an agent, he saw that Steiner was stating outright what he had been struggling to work out in terms of the “Pro­saic” and the “Poetic” qualities of language.  Although the likenesses between Steiner’s thought and his own were patent, Barfield was always reluctant “to father upon him many of the views on poetry which I have expressed.”[14]  Fully aware that his connection “to the Spiritual Science of Rudolf Steiner,” as he puts it, was likely to cost him his academic respectability, Barfield categorizes the reactions his relation to Steiner often evokes:

            One class [of three] of them (and of course I am referring to favorably disposed readers) says: ‘This Barfield is a deep one ¾ says a lot  of interesting things ¾ has “mean­ingful insights” ¾ What a pity he goes and spoils it all by continually dragging that man Steiner.’[15]

In an autobiographical essay Barfield tells us that he ap­proached Steiner “with an attitude of caution, even of suspicion; particularly [that] he was put off by a certain residual aroma of the Theosophical Society.”[16]  Apparently, in Barfield’s eyes dragging in the mainline theosophy of Blavatsky (if that is what he had in mind) would have been even a greater “pity.”  Whatever his thoughts might have been, however, it seems that theosophy as Barfield understood it did not satisfy the empirical requirements of his British sensibility, probably because it struck him at best as too religious and mystical.[17]  Theosophy would not let him remain the British Barfield that he knew he was.  In any case, another digression will show that, when peo­ple say “that man Steiner,” they mean “that crank” or more col­loquially “that nut case Steiner.”

          In The Way of Initiation, or How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, for one example, Steiner gives explicit step-by-step directions for developing one’s psychic faculties, in order to see the aura surrounding a seed.

            Place before you a small seed of a plant.  It is then nec­essary    . . . to create with intensity the right kind of thoughts. . . . If that is accomplished in the right way. . . an inward force will make itself felt. . . . The grain of seed will appear as if enclosed in a small luminous cloud.  The spiritualized vision of the student perceives it as a kind of flame.  This flame is of lilac colour in the centre, blue at the edges.[18]

If the distinction between psychic and spiritual strikes aca­demic readers as dubious, seeing the auras of seeds can only appear worse.  Seeing auras is neither serious theosophy nor mainline science, certainly not in Barfield’s day; but in its limited way the method is undeniably both experiential and scientific.  The theosophical objection would be that developing such talents is an irrelevant and dangerous diversion that does not conduce to edification, detrimental to genuine moral and spiritual development.

          Barfield was not interested in such “sideshow tricks” as seeing auras, of seeds or of people.  It was what he saw as the empirical or meta-empirical provenance, if you will, of Steiner’s work which attracted him.  Here was science applied to more than matter, indeed, science which went further and also refined our understanding of matter.  Here was a supernaturalism which did not threaten his empirical world.  In his youthful attempt to surmount an “intellectual climate” which led him “to suspect that somehow it might be all a subjective illusion,”[19] he was searching for something which was more than logical positiv­ism and its concomitant dead end behaviorism, but something which was at the same time also scientific and capable of “com­municating the results. . . in intelligible language.”[20]  He was convinced he had found this in Steiner.

          In other words, in Steiner Barfield saw the legitimate, hard won achievements of empiricism joined with a capacity of mind at work, which, in his judgment, could carry these achieve­ments forward into a more highly evolved understanding of man and the world.  One might say that Barfield saw that Steiner did not deny the existence of stones, kicked them like a good English-man should, but with the telling difference that he rede­fined them and the foot he used.  Here was a kind of thought which could meet and refute materialism on its own grounds.  Drawing on Coleridge, for better of worse, Barfield called this quality “imagination.”  One is obliged to say, for better or worse, because the word imagination still calls up ideas of “make believe,” “unreal,” and out-right “imaginary.”  Nonetheless, Barfield found Steiner to be “imaginative” and “realistic” enough to free himself from the epistemological limits of mate­rialism without having to sacrifice his own empiricism.

          And throughout his career Barfield struggled to define the combinative “Spiritual Science” of the “imagination.”  “By all means,” he wrote:

            call it self-expression if you will, provided you know something at least of the history of selfhood and something of where the true self of every man resides.  By all means go on speaking of man’s ‘creative imagination’, provided you are aware that imagination is the true successor of inspiration and not merely our parading and parading of superficial idiosyncrasy and fleeting impulse.[21]

Barfield’s view that “imagination is the true successor of inspiration” amounts to another way of describing the nature of his attraction to Steiner’s “Spiritual Science,” a phrase which even now much contemporary science (with the exclusion of physics) would still regard as an oxymoron.  Barfield insists that things genuinely understood are “accepted by the imagination as well as by the judgment,” and are “accepted in fact by whatever part of us it is that takes certain things for granted, or as a matter of course”.[22]

          At this point, one more digressive glance at Barfield’s fellow Inkling C. S. Lewis will further clarify Barfield’s at­traction to Steiner and the role of this attraction upon Barfield’s own growing attractiveness and influence.  While both Barfield nor Lewis rejected the vulgar positivism of their day, neither would in fact surrender his native empiricism, and fol­lowed complementary paths to preserve the solid, natural world they took for granted “as a matter of course.”  Neither ever questioned materialism as such but treated it as an established fact.  Lewis rescued the solidity of his natural world by rejecting Barfield’s matter-threatening imagination, which he felt would blur the boundaries between mind and matter and lead to confusion.  On the other hand, Barfield, whose stance is more complicated, rescued the solidity of his world by choosing matter-tolerant anthroposophy and rejecting matter-threatening theosophy, which he apparently felt would reduce the world to an unproductive idea.  It might be said that where Lewis feared softer matter, Barfield feared firmer ideas.  The fact that neither Lewis nor Barfield questioned materialism in a radical way, however, before they set about to accommodate it, indicates how essential a part it was in their thinking.  In spite of Lewis’ successive models and Barfield’s phenomenal idols, at bottom, the traditional idea that even matter is made of mind does not figure importantly in their thinking.  As a result of this omission, it turned out that essentially the same mind set which led Lewis to accommodate matter by moving backwards into St. Augustine’s “Old Western”[23] world of faith led Barfield to accommodate matter by moving forward toward Steiner’s version of “the only tradition.”

          Barfield was keenly aware of this precarious fork in the road and of the ambiguities to which an imaginative reconciliation of mind and matter could lead.  In looking for the “truly contemporary thinker. . . one who has found that this antithe­sis, too, is bridgeable,”[24] he presents the “Romantic Theologians” such as C. S. Lewis in Hilliard’s terms, as conservative thinkers feeling their way cautiously into what seemed to them to be novel lines of thought.

I have sometimes wondered whether it might have been otherwise in England if, for example, the Romantic Theologians, the Inklings, such as C. S. Lewis, or some of them, had chosen to explore the path Coleridge opened up for the English speaking world; if they had sought a reconciliation between reason and imagination. . . . if Lewis might have been led to mitigate his occasionally Talmudic emphasis on the divine transcendence, and if Charles Williams’s brilliantly mystical doctrine of ‘coinherence’ might have gained something in depth. . . .

            What seems certain is that, had they done so, they could hardly have developed the particular quality, unique, valuable, irreplaceable (as all positive qualities are ir­replaceably valuable in a world we would have as rich as possible) that they did in fact develop.[25]

These observations shed considerable light on Barfield’s provi­dential choice not to turn to the holding action of the emo­tional dualism called faith, to the end run around matter called mysticism, nor, for that matter, to the full metaphysics of mind in “the only tradition.”  In his mind these were dead end streets.

          Any of these three routes, for admittedly different rea­sons, would have canceled his uniquely individual recapitulation of the linguistic implications of “the only tradition” and thus robbed his contemporaries of a “natural supernaturalism,” to use Abrams’ language, which could speak to their present condition “in intelligible language.”  Too much faith and mysticism would have precluded and too full and premature an engagement with “the only tradition” would have preempted Barfield’s timely and effective reinvention of the metaphysical wheel.  It is only fair, however, to point out that he applies the same logic to himself:

            I sometime wonder whether or not this may not have proved an advantage. . . .  And I wonder if the fact that I seemed to have discovered, or rather to be discovering, these things for myself, mainly by pondering the felt dif­ference to which I have referred [between ‘the Prosaic’ and the ‘Poetic’], may not have imparted a certain energy that accounts for its having apparently outlasted some other books by men who knew a great deal more of literature and the history of ideas.[26]

Needless to say, rediscovering “the only tradition” on his own and for himself did lend Barfield’s efforts “a certain energy,” and this goes a long way toward accounting for their power and attractiveness.  This epistemological felix culpa of discovering new knowledge through honest if initially ignorant experience is not new.  As Katherine Hilliard and Barfield himself remind us, “the last few decades” have indeed been marked by the “tendency of conservative thinkers to feel their way cautiously into what seems to them a novel line of thought,” but which turns out to be an idiosyncratic fragment of “the only tradition.”

          This paradox, if you will, explains Barfield’s affinity for anthroposophy.  Barfield’s “certain energy,” the “particular quality,” or the “new and tentative form,” with which he reca­pitulates “the only tradition” is a product, or at least a co-conditioned concomitant, of his own “personal equation,” stimu­lated by the similar admixture of imaginative materialism he found in Steiner.  Had Barfield known more about “the only tra­dition” before he encountered Steiner, he would, I believe, have been obliged to qualify if not to reject Steiner on account of his psychic Germanic side.  In that case, it follows, he could not have been as impressed as he obviously was, and would, therefore, have lost the impetus that, perhaps, only an innocent sense of discovery can provide.  He too then “could hardly have developed the particular quality, unique, valuable, irreplaceable. . . that [he] did in fact develop.”  Ultimately, however, these circumstances constitute the basis of his growing impor­tance and have enabled him to carry literary criticism and the philosophy of language forward by working out and providing us with a usefully concrete and detailed analysis of the linguistic implications of “the only tradition.”  So doing, he brought intelligent metaphysics back into the study of literature. 

          There is, of course, everything to say in Barfield’s de­fense, much of which, as we have seen, he says himself.  Barfield meets Thoreau’s test of a real writer, to provide “first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life.”  In this light we can ask no more of Barfield than the fresh and convincing combination of materialism and imagination which he might not have given us without the help of Steiner and anthroposophy.  Barfield requires facts to be “accepted by the imagination as well as by the judgment,” and, as Thoreau anticipates, “When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis.”  The students of literature will at length establish their work on the basis of Barfield’s evolutionary imagination, and “the amount of it is, the imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher than Nature goes”[27] ¾ not to mention contemporary literary theory.

[1] This essay was first read as a paper at the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, October 14-16, 1999.