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The culminating stage
in the evolution of consciousness,
the "entelechy of the earth-evolution as a whole" (RCA 44), when
man "regains his at-one-ment with the principle of creation, only now in
full self-consciousness as a self-contained Ego" (RCA 85), final
participation is a difficult (if not impossible) to grasp idea,1
which can perhaps best be understood as "a self conscious rapport with
the whole phenomenal world" (IOB 13), or as a "willed consciousness of
[original] participation" [EC 27] which "must itself be raised from
potentiality to act" (SA 137). Final participation will be possible
only when "the macrocosm is . . . focused to an invisible point in the
isolated Ego" (RCA 48), for in final participation "man's Creator
speaks from within man himself" (BAR 66); we grasp fully our directionally
creator relation with the divine.
Final participation
is not attainable simply through imitation of original
participation. For the Greeks, Barfield
reminds us, were inside the world's unity; we are outside of it.2
We live in thought, not in thinking, and thus we must "first . . . realize
that it [the original unity] is still there, and then . . . learn how to
get back into it, how to rise once more from thought into thinking, taking
with us, however, that fuller self-consciousness
which the Greeks never knew . . ." (RCA 61). The models upon which
Barfield draws in formulating his theory of final participation come not
from the Greeks but from Goethe and Rudolf
Steiner.3
"One need not be
an analyst," R J. Reilly has observed,
"to see the progression Barfield intends: from the solitude of private
thought, to the strengthened thought that rays out into the thought of
the universe, to the absolute dissolution of private thought in the universe,
or the Kingdom--or from subjective idealism to
Anthroposophy
to heaven" (BAR 76). Into his nineties, Barfield has retained a firm faith
that "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" (SA 161). But if we are ever to attain final participation,
it will be in the far distant future. It does not loom on the horizon.
"Final participation," as Barfield writes in Saving the Appearances'
final chapter,
is indeed the mystery of the kingdom--of
the kingdom that is to come on earth, as it is in heaven--and we are still
only on the verge of its outer threshold. Two thousand years is a trifle
of time compared with the ages which preceded the Incarnation.
More than a thousand years had to pass before the Western Church reached
even that premonitory inkling of final participation which it expressed
by adding the Filloque to the Creed, and acknowledged that the Holy Spirit
proceeds from the Son as well as, originally, from the Father. (182)
The closing lines of
Barfield's verse play Orpheus
may be taken as a depiction of the
mindset of final participation (the "he" of these lines can be taken to
be not just Orpheus, the archetypal
poet, but mankind as well):
He shall ascend Parnassus
awake and find his soul:
Proteus shall work unsleeping
for ever, and forms shall flow
As the meaning of words
a poet has mastered. It shall be so
That Zeus shall abandon
to Chronos the antique starry
crown,
And softly out of Olympus
the high Gods shall come down
Shedding ambrosial fragrance
in clouds that for ever abide,
And earth shall be covered
with blushes and make herself sweet as a bride.
And her light shall be liquid
as honey, her air taste good like bread
In the mouths of them that
dwell upon earth, and all shall be fed. (O 112)
See in particular
Saving
the Appearances, Chaps. XX, XXII, XXIV, XXV; Unancestral Voice,
passim. |
1Against
the criticism that his eschatology is too complicated, Barfield explains
that "The movements of fingers disentangling a crumpled skein are complicated,
but the final result is not complication" (SA 163). Still, in Owen
Barfield: Man and Meaning, Barfield admits that any definitive explanation
of final participation is "quite beyond me." |
2"There
is no question of going backwards and trying to be little Greeks. . . .
The task which their philosophers instinctively set themselves was . .
. to get outside a plane of consciousness in which they normally lived,
so as to be able to conceive of it: to turn thinking into thought. Our
problem is the converse of this. We are outside it already. Our task is
twofold, first to realize that it is still there, and then to learn how
to get back into it, how to rise once more from thought into thinking,
taking with us, however, that fuller self-consciousness which the Greeks
never knew, and which could never have been ours if they had not laboured
to turn thinking into thought. Thus, being normally outside, it follows
that we shall also be conscious of it as a different world, a world into
which we can plunge at will" (RCA 61). |
3"Beta-thinking
leads to final, by way of the inexorable elimination of all original, participation.
Consequently Goethe was able to develop an elementary technique, but unable
or unwilling, to erect a metaphysics, of final participation" (SA
139). |
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