Leibniz
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The "transformation
of the world of nature--including, of course, the human body--from a nature
consisting of Archetypal Matter to a nature consisting of matter as we
know it," Burgeon explains in Unancestral Voice, was "an event occurring
in history" (91).
Prior to the fall
of man, and under the rule of original participation,
the world--not yet separate and detached, not yet objective--appeared,
to non-materialistic thinking, to be made of Archetypal Matter (which Burgeon
also calls "Edenstuff"--a more Germanic designation):
It seems
to me (Barfield explains--again through his mouthpiece Burgeon, this time
in
Worlds Apart] that the paradise--imago--or
myth, or story--is in a way the symbol par excellence. I
imagine this is why it is so universal and why it has so many ramifying
significances. It is the symbol of symbols; because it symbolizes, not
so much any single, non-physical archetype, but non-physical existence
in general--non-physical existence as such. You will never understand symbols
until you have grasped that pre-historic man in his unconscious goes back,
not to the animal kingdom, as the nineteenth century fondly imagined, but
to a paradisal state when there was no death, because there was no matter.
(WA 124, Burgeon is speaking)
With Leibniz
(and German idealism generally),
Barfield would agree that what we now think of as matter should be properly
conceived of as coagulum spiritus.
See in particular
Unancestral
Voice, Chap. 8, "The Fall in Man and Nature" (RCA 205-222). |
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