Barfield Scholarship
Essays, Book Chapters, and Monographs
on Owen Barfield and His Work

Jacob Sherman
An Ever Diverse Pair:
Owen Barfield, Teilhard de Chardin
and the Evolution of Consciousness

 Chapter Five

An Ever Diverse Pair: Barfield and Teilhard Together 

The Sabbath, thus, is more than an armistice, more than an interlude; it is a profound conscious harmony of man and the world, a sympathy for all things and a participation in the spirit that unites what is below with what is above.  All that is divine in the world is brought into union with God.  This is Sabbath, and the true happiness of the universe.

 –Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath[1] 

Having attended to the common intellectual inheritance of both Barfield and Teilhard (our examination of progress in chapter one), looked at the individual systems of each author (chapters two and three), and attempted a Barfieldian critique of Teilhard, it is time now to finally ask the question of their compatibility.  Is a Barfieldian-Teilhardian synthesis possible?  If so, is it even profitable?  In order to do so, we will divide the chapter into two sections.  To begin with, we need to look explicitly at that which has been implicit throughout this thesis: namely, the relationship between Owen Barfield's thought and that of Teilhard de Chardin.  Following such an analysis, we will begin to sketch what sort of vision might emerge from their meeting, a new vision of the evolution of consciousness that aims to embrace the truth in both Barfield and Teilhard.

An Ever Diverse Pair: The Polar Relationship of Barfield and Teilhard

Upon discovering Owen Barfield, it is not uncommon to immediately associate his work with that of Teilhard de Chardin.  As we noted earlier, both concern themselves with the evolution of consciousness, both approach it from an interdisciplinary stance and moreover, both do so from within a Christian framework.  The similarities are there for the taking.  Further study of both authors however, leads one to recognize the disjunctions between them.  We dealt with some of these disjunctions last chapter.  And this is where, in the work of most Barfieldians, the investigation tends to stop.  Teilhard is dismissed as someone suffering from R.U.P., and that is that.

Such a dismissal, however, seems inadequate.  After all, Barfield nearly always tempered his criticism of Teilhard with praise, enough praise to make such a curt dismissal of Teilhardian thought questionable.  But the question remains: what sort of relationship can embrace the differences described in the last chapter?    I believe the answer lies waiting in one of Barfield's more obscure novels, This Ever Diverse Pair.

Written as much for his own therapy as anything else, the novel describes the tenuous relationship between two London solicitors (really, two sides of Barfield's own personality): the one, Burden, a practical, down-to-earth character and the other, Burgeon, alive with the imagination, a poet and a dreamer.  For those interested in Barfield, the book is an interesting, candid disclosure of Barfield's own struggles.  The story is not the issue, however; rather, what interests us is the concept of polarity lying at the novel's center.  Barfield reconciled his opposites and, by his own admission, avoided a nervous breakdown by putting onto paper the polar relationship between Burgeon (Barfield's poetic side) and Burden (Barfield's prosaic side).  For Barfield, polarity is more than an interesting concept; it is a fundamental structure of reality.  Life, consciousness, ideas, the universe–all exist within relationships of polarity and This Ever Diverse Pair aims to show that polar relationships can exist within (and presumably between) people, too.  Likewise, it seems that the relationship between Barfield and Teilhard may also be one of polarity.

Teilhard, as we noted in the previous chapter, looks at and describes the evolution of consciousness through the lens of his cosmic phenomenology.  For him, this meant attending to the objective givenness of phenomena with little attention paid to the subjective role of the perceiver.  N. M. Wildiers comments, "The truth is that with Teilhard it is the 'object' that counts and that demands his whole attention, whilst the epistemological problems and psychological niceties of analysis lie pretty well outside of his purview."[2]  Teilhard is concerned with the extrinsic or exoteric side of the evolution of consciousness.  He describes the universe in exquisite detail from its primal flaring forth through the emergence of the simple elements, then the birth of galaxies, and the formation of planets; he witnesses to the first teetering combinations of chemicals giving rise to nucleotides and the birth of life, flora, fauna, avians, mammals, and suddenly, the emergence of the hominids: Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo sapiens.  Teilhard takes note of the short but momentous history of these hominids, from the first appearance of Stone Age tools 1-4 million years ago in the hands of Australopithecus to the advent of the communication-age and the mastery of the atom and by modern Homo sapiens.  And in all of this, Teilhard sees rich resonances of meaning.  As Thomas Berry notes, "[Teilhard] is the first person to outline, in some full detail and with some meaningful insight the four phases of the evolutionary process: galactic evolution, earth evolution, life evolution, human evolution."[3]

For his part, Barfield does not propose any major revision to this evolutionary schema insofar as it speaks of "the physical forms–the 'outside'–of nature… the nature we look back onto."[4]  Barfield's angle is different; instead of looking back onto the outside of nature, he looks back into the world, the inside of nature as it were.  His methodology, particularly his study of etymological history, allows him to peer at consciousness from within and , from that vantage point, to extrapolate concerning consciousness throughout history.  Barfield explains this in History, Guilt and Habit.  As he writes:

When we speak… about consciousness, about the point at which consciousness arose and so forth, we are speaking not merely about human nature, as we call it, but also about nature itself.  When we study consciousness historically, contrasting perhaps what men perceive and think now with what they perceived and thought at some period in the past, when we study long-term changes in consciousness, we are studying changes in the world itself, and not simply changes in the human brain.  We are not studying some so-called "inner" world, divided off, by a skin or a skull, from a so-called "outer" world; we are trying to study the world itself from its inner aspect.  Consciousness is not a tiny bit of the world stuck on to the rest of it.  It is the inside of the whole world.[5]

Note that Barfield is not simply saying that he studies the world's interior but rather that he studies the whole world from its inner aspect.  Teilhard attempts the former and we called his approach exoteric; we could say that Barfield, who accomplishes the latter, deals with the evolution of consciousness esoterically. To quote Barfield again:

To study language historically, taking into account not only its analytical function but also its poetic substance, is a good way of studying the evolution of consciousness.  In doing so we are studying that evolution from within, and therefore studying consciousness itself…"[6]  

We are now able to describe the principle relationship between the work of our two authors. With some exceptions it can be said that Teilhard and Barfield attend respectively to the external and internal aspects of world evolution as a whole.  They have a polar relationship, Barfield approaching the evolution of consciousness from within (esoterically) and Teilhard approaching this evolution from without (exoterically).  Once this crucial dynamic is recognized, it becomes far easier to bring these two together in a working relationship without sacrificing the depth of either one or the other. As with all polarities there is a tension between them and modifications to both writers will be called for (such as we saw in the preceding chapter) but, recognizing the respective internal and external domains of their work, such adjustments can be weighed and executed intelligently.  Polarities after all, are not opposites, and polar tension exists within a greater whole.  In this case, that greater whole is the evolution of the world, internal and external, and both the perspectives of Barfield and of Teilhard are needed if one is to give a truly integral account of the evolution of consciousness.  The two must be brought together.  As Barfield declares, "The actual evolution of the earth we know must have been at the same time an evolution of consciousness."[7]

Towards a Synthesis

Having established the possibility of a Barfieldian/Teilhardian synthesis, it remains for us to create one.  What might such a synthesis look like?  What sort of guidelines can one follow in the creation of such a synthesis?

It is best to begin with the question of methodology first.  It seems clear that if the synthesis is to be true, then it must be respectful to both parties.  In other words, a synthesis based on misrepresentation, categorical rejection, or any other form of slipshod scholarship will not do.   This is the logic behind our chapters two and three, where we focussed on giving a sympathetic and accurate reading of Barfield and Teilhard.  A genuine synthesis will include what is most unique and profound in the respective systems of Teilhard and Barfield.  However, because this is a genuine synthesis (in the Hegelian sense) it will at the same time transform these profound and unique points by placing them into a larger whole (which will necessarily change, to some extent, the part the points play).  So then, what are the unique and profound points of Barfield and Teilhard that we ought to be looking at?

We have neither the time nor the space to go extensively through this synthesizing process, but we can begin to suggest contours of a Barfieldian/Teilhardian synthesis by focussing our attention solely on the one great and relatively unique insight of each author–the genius of Barfield and the genius of Teilhard.  This will not be something like, All things in the cosmos evolve; nor yet, all things including consciousness evolve.  Such insights, though profound, are shared by many including both of our authors.  Rather, we need crucial points (crucial within the framework of their own system) that Barfield and Teilhard do not immediately share with each other.  Let us look first at Barfield.

Barfield's conclusion about consciousness as the supra-individual matrix of all things is just about as close as one can get to a perennial insight from the world's wisdom traditions. From the Patristic Logos, to the Buddha-mind of Mahayana Buddhism, from the eternal Tao to the Neo-Platonic One, or from the Hindu Brahman to the Kabbalistic Shekinah, some form of trans-cosmic intelligence is almost universally perceived as investing itself in the intelligible universe.  What makes Barfield's position unique is that he has marshaled etymology as proof, good and convincing proof, and has wed his conclusions to evolutionary theory.  This then, seems to stand out as Barfield's one great and unique insight and can be expressed in the maxim, 'Interior is anterior'.  As the essential point of Barfield's system, this insight must therefore be preserved in any potential synthesis.

For Teilhard, the one great and unique insight that seems to stand out is none other than Teilhard's Law.  In chapter two we described this law, also known as the Law of Complexity-Consciousness, as stating two central propositions regarding evolution:

1.     That with the progression of time matter tends towards complexification.

2.     That there is a correspondence between the level of complexity and the level of consciousness displayed within matter.

This is often reduced to the maxim that 'co-extensive with their without there is a within to things'.  Teilhard's law seems to be supported by a wealth of empirical and biological evidence.  This law then, must be preserved and included in the forthcoming Barfieldian/Teilhardian synthesis.

The problem is to find a way for the two insights (Teilhard's Law and Barfield's 'Interior is anterior'), seemingly at loggerheads, to be preserved in a greater synthesis.  However, in order for this to happen, these insights must not only be preserved but will also be transformed by their insertion into a new conceptual environment–indeed, they must be transformed.   In order to do this, let us look first at the manner in which Teilhard's Law might go through such a metamorphosis.

The Law of Form and Freedom

The Law of Complexity-Consciousness must, I suggest, find its new identity in what we can call the Law of Form and Freedom.  This new law requires no adjustment to point one (that with the progression of time matter tends towards complexification) and only a relatively minor (though, consequential) adjustment to point two.  Instead of stating that there is a correspondence between the level of complexity and the level of consciousness displayed within matter, The Law of Form and Freedom states that there is a correspondence between the complexity of a thing's form and the freedom of that same thing.

The reason for this change should be obvious from the discussion of R.U.P. in chapter four.  By equating level of complexity with level of consciousness, Teilhard necessarily ends up with atomized granules of consciousness floating around in stark isolation at the beginning of time.  This, as we demonstrated in chapter four, will not do and is irreconcilable with Barfield's great insight.  However, if instead of equating complexity with consciousness, we equate it with interior freedom then none of the problems of unresolved positivism arise.  One can then join nearly all of the world's wisdom traditions and the conclusions of Barfield's own etymological studies in postulating a primal matrix of consciousness, and none need worry about the atomized granules of matter which it seems were most assuredly there.  The Law of Form and Freedom allows one to conceive of consciousness as something other than a skin- or matter-encapsulated phenomenon.  Furthermore, this move from the Law of Complexity-Consciousness to the Law of Form and Freedom derives great merit from the fact that it is suggested by Teilhard's own writing.  In The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard equates his concept of consciousness with freedom (what he calls 'spontaneity').  He writes, "The within, consciousness, spontaneity–three expressions for the same thing."[8]

So we reformulate Teilhard's Law, preserving what was essential in it but allowing it a new identity in a new system as The Law of Form and Freedom.   Once again, this law states that there is a correspondence between the complexity of a thing's form and the freedom of that same thing.  Unlike Teilhard's Law, which often spoke of a thing's within being co-extensive with its without, the Law of Form and Freedom does not limit itself to the complexity of matter but can include the complexity of other non-spatial forms, as well.  This seems a significant advance (one entirely derived through the meeting of the polar emphases of Barfield and Teilhard).  For example, while the human brain has not greatly evolved in three million years, consciousness irrefutably has (as both Barfield and Teilhard show).  The form that has complexified during these three million years is not material (gray matter) but mental–new cognitive structures, greater linguistic structures, abstract reasoning–these are the forms that have increasingly complexified in human history.  As even Teilhard noted, evolution seems now to be concentrated in the noosphere (and no longer, primarily, the biosphere).  According to the newly formulated Law of Form and Freedom then, one need not look to, say, the Internet for evidence of increasing cognitive and spiritual evolution.  Such evolution can just as well take place inside, that is to say, we are open now not only to an evolution of consciousness but to an evolution in consciousness.

I hasten to add that, foreign as it may seem, this is a profoundly Christian vision.  The freedom into which one grows is not only freedom from the biosphere (the ability to choose, to some extent, how one will react to instinctual energies like hunger or anger or sexual attraction) nor again, from the primal matrix of consciousness (the freedom, that Barfield describes, to create and discover meaning rather than simply having it forced upon oneself in original participation) but also and especially, the freedom for love.  Far from injecting an unwarranted piece of faith into the picture, the assertion that freedom means the freedom to love is backed by solid evidence.  Teilhard, of course, is brilliant in demonstrating that evolution has all along been the evolution of love, but there are other sources, as well.  Developmental theories (e.g., the work of Habermas on socio-cultural evolution, James Fowler on stages of faith, or Beck and Cowan on Spiral Dynamics) often amass significant evidence for what future developmental progress might look like.  Significantly, these varied theories are in relative agreement that higher stages of development necessarily manifest some sort of emergent cooperative and embracing structure, structures that might just as well be called growth in love.  Growth in freedom then, is growth in the ability to love freely which is, of course, central to the Christian message.[9]

Participation and Integration

This discussion of growth in freedom thus leads us back to Barfield.  We identified Barfield's great insight as the recognition that the evolution of consciousness proceeds from immersion in a primal matrix of consciousness (original participation, the 'clear lake of meaning') to the creation of individual selves capable of freely choosing participation (final participation).  What sort of transformation is required of this great insight?

The necessary transformation, it seems, is primarily semantic.  While Barfield's evidence regarding original participation is quite compelling, his choice of words regarding final participation seems unhelpful.  It is far too easy for one to consider final participation as mere regression (to original participation) and the difference between original and final participation becomes difficult to imagine.  Patrick Grants comments:

[Barfield's] idea of final participation is stirring, but imprecise… It is not just a matter of the image being 'crude': it embodies no particular sense, and is a failure of the imagination to appear convincingly… [We are never] told what it means in terms of day to day living.[10]

If the evolution of form, as we amended Teilhard's law to state, correlates to the evolution of freedom (a maxim to which Barfield could give full assent), then the term integration serves as a better description of future development than does final participation.

Integration seems to provide a conceptual milieu in which to more fully understand Barfield's notion of meaning being collected from the peripheries into individual centers and then radiating freely from those individual centers back out to the cosmos.  What evolution has accomplished in the individual can be pictured as the collection of meaning within one's own self.  This, in turn, grants true freedom because meaning is no longer imposed through biology or participation, but becomes a choice.  The task of the individual now is to re-insert meaning into the world through conscious participation.  What this actually means however, is a willed re-integration with the cosmos, and further, with the divine Logos, in the individual.  It was necessary, if individuals and concomitant freedom were ever to evolve, that one should separate oneself from the physiosphere, the biosphere and the lake of given meaning that such intimacy with the natural world afforded.  However, now that true freedom has been gained, the task of the human being is to integrate those parts from which we have necessarily and beneficially differentiated ourselves.

Integration (unlike the word 'participation') captures the dynamic quality of this task.  It is an active not passive word and therefore highlights the freedom humanity has in choosing to integrate.   Integration, furthermore, may be envisioned as occurring somehow through the agencies of love.  Original participation was essentially narcissistic–one could not but identify with all things (including, unconsciously, the Logos) because one had no sense of differentiation.  Like an infant, original participation perceives all things as an extension of oneself.  Integration however, is love-in-action because it involves choosing freely to identify with the Other.  Barfield rarely speaks this way outright, but such a concept is everywhere implicit in his work.  Love, to the extent that it involves (as Christian love does) identification with the other, is a radical and active form of voluntary participation–that is to say, it is a means of integration.  Nowhere is the movement of loving integration better described than in the words of Doestoevsky's Zosima.   In the Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky invests the elder Zosima with the collective wisdom of the deepest strains of Russian Orthodox spirituality.  In one of Zosima's sermons he instructs his pupils:

Love all of God's creation, both he whole of it and every grain of sand.  Love every leaf, every ray of God's light.  Love animals, love plants, love each thing.  If you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in things.  Once you have perceived it, you will begin tirelessly to perceive more and more of it every day.  And you will come at last to love the whole world with an entire, universal love.[11] 

Is this not the movement that Barfield has been describing all along?  Zosima is describing the movement towards integration, the free and willing perception of the mystery of God (the Logos) in all things (what Barfield calls final participation).  In this passage, Dostoevsky captures also the necessity of the agency of love in the movement towards this integration of the whole world and, indeed, the divine mystery that gave it form.

Together then, a vision of evolution that moves from original participation to integration through the agencies of love and a vision of evolution that follows the Law of Form and Freedom allows us to create a workable Barfieldian/Teilhardian synthesis.  This new synthesis brings the possibility of including a greater amount of truth than either Barfield or Teilhard could offer alone for it does equal justice both to the external and internal poles of consciousness evolution.

Concluding Reflections

Finally then, having discerned an adequate method of synthesis let us conclude with some speculation on further ways that such a synthesis might take shape.  We lack the space to work such a vision out with the rigor required, so these last pages are offered as a series of unscientific reflections and speculations on areas of possible further development.

The Interdisciplinary Character of Consciousness Evolution

If there is one thing clear about the nature of the evolution of consciousness it is its intrinsic interdisciplinary nature.  Consciousness is that liminal space between the humanities and the hard sciences, between poetry and paleontology, between philosophy and physics.  Consciousness can be studied but not only or even primarily with instruments.

This becomes evident in both Barfield and Teilhard–the former with his acutely poetic sense and his appropriation of quantum physics and psychology, the latter in his blending of mysticism with geology and the biological sciences.   Future development of a Barfieldian/Teilhardian synthesis must only expand this integral character of investigation.   The two-culture split, as C. P. Snow called it, between humanities and ethics on the one hand, and the sciences on the other, is untenable when considering a picture as vast as that of cosmic evolution.  Bringing together Teilhard's love of solid things, of iron and the earth, with Barfield's passion for words, for consciousness, for intuition and myth, holds the potential for the healing of this fissure.  Indeed, Barfield's work might serve as a nice point of re-entry for the humanities so long isolated from the "hard sciences" in the academic discussion of the given world.

Evolution Deep and Wide

This modern age has been characterized by an unprecedented sense of expansion.  Spatially the universe burst forth into inestimable distances while simultaneously physicists began looking into infinitesimal spaces.  In every area of life and time horizons exploded and knowledge multiplied uncontrollably.  Barfield and Teilhard's projects were attempts at creating a cosmology for this widening modern age. These were exercises of the imagination, of expansion, attempts to incorporate more truth than had yet been done.

Future development of this vision means drawing the ring yet wider still.  It remains for someone to tell the story of cosmic evolution in such a manner as to pay equal homage to both internal and external realities.  We have seen Teilhard's failure here, as a result of his methodology, and his inability to really look within the phenomenon of consciousness.  Barfield, for his part, seems to pay too little heed to the externals. There is little talk of biology in Barfield, little appreciation of what Wittgenstein referred to as "the forms of life." His concern is almost exclusively with consciousness, human consciousness in particular.  He writes, "The biological evolution of the human race is, in fact, only one half of the story; the other has still to be told."[12]  Barfield devoted himself to telling this other half but failed to ever connect it adequately to the biological story.  All of this, biological and psychological, is the one story of evolution/creation.  To tell this story is the great task of future Barfieldian/Teilhardian investigation.

The new story must include the polarities of inner and outer evolution, even going so far as to find some way of speaking about the time before inner and outer had separated. This will be difficult for moderns especially when it comes to the integration of modern cosmology or cosmogenesis with Barfield's maxim, "Interior is anterior."  However, unless one refutes Barfield on his own ground (philological and linguistic evidence) place must be made for such an integration.  We must create a way of retelling the story of cosmic evolution (and the adoption of the Law of Form and Freedom goes a significant way in this direction) that gives honor to the primal matrix of consciousness out of which all things, according to Barfield, must have emerged. 

Telling such a story means developing a new discourse, one likely to be more poetic, but one that does not neglect biological and physical realities either.  One avenue towards such a retelling might to be to focus on the phenomenon of perception for it is here that the boundaries between inner and outer remain most indistinct.  Teilhard seems to have had some inkling of this when he described cosmic evolution as the evolution of ever more perfect eyes.[13]

This story will be the story of evolution deep and wide.  Deep because it will not neglect that which lies beneath the surface of all things, interiority, and indeed the depth of consciousness out of which all things emerged.  But this will be a wide story, as well, covering the vast expanses of interstellar space, the planets in their orbits, yet still concerned with the minutia of flowering life and the running brooks.  This will be a natural history inclusive of all the many, deep and wide phenomena of creation, each examined through methods appropriate to its kind.

Evolution and the Rebirth of Meaning 

What good is all this?  Why the urgency?  Quite simply put, context gives meaning and of all the ecological crises (e.g., fishery and forest depletion, the destruction of the ozone layer, the eradication of species…) it is the extinction of meaning which threatens us most.  A Barfieldian/Teilhardian synthesis that tells the deep and wide story of cosmic and consciousness evolution opens the doors for a rebirth of meaning in the world.

The meaning of a red light at 10^th and Broadway is markedly different than its significance in a red light district further to the east or, for that matter, flashing on the topside of a police car.  It is the context that gives an object its meaning.  The crisis of meaning in the modern west (though it is quickly becoming a global crisis) is in large part due to a loss of context, what so many writers have already rightly diagnosed as alienation.    A grand story then, a non-exploitive meta-narrative, offers the possibility of re-introducing meaning into modern discourse and felt experience.

There is a further element that needs be discussed when we turn our attention to evolution and meaning.  Both Barfield and Teilhard, in seeking such a renaissance of meaning, wedded their picture of cosmic evolution to the West's central narrative of meaning, namely, the Gospel story.  Biblical metaphors, such as St. Paul's comparing the resurrection body to a seed's flowering (1 Cor. 15), invite us to re-imagine the Gospel story in terms of natural history, or alternatively, to re-imagine natural history as Gospel.  Ernesto Cardenal is elegantly simple here when he states:

Because all creatures on earth are related through biological evolution, the resurrection of the body is but one further stage… With the resurrection of Christ this final stage has already begun.  Christ is the first specimen of this new "biological" era or, as St. Paul said, "the first-born" and the "first fruits of the resurrection."[14]

 And this is the task: to somehow rescue meaning by reconnecting the natural with the sacred, by abandoning the presuppositions of Cartesian philosophy and deistic religion for a vision of an evolving universe at every point permeable to the divine.  Such a story, like the very incarnation itself, will call for a renewed spiritual-materialism, to say boldly with Blake, as both Barfield and Teilhard did, "Everything that lives is Holy."  To re-mythologize the world and to re-tell the stories and myths of faith with a grounding in the living world is to rescue endangered meaning.

Of course, such an account need not only connect with the Christian story.  While I, for instance, as a Christian, believe that there are elements of the Gospel story implicated and explicated by a study of world evolution, I recognize the perspectival nature of such an affirmation.  Others, be they Muslim, Taoist, Shinto or any faith for that matter, will discover their own resonances in such study.  This, in fact, is already well underway.  A contemporary of Barfield and Teilhard's, Sri Aurobindo worked extensively to connect the Hindu tradition with an evolutionary picture; closer to home, the American-Buddhist Ken Wilber has pioneered his own vision of the evolution of consciousness with an eye toward reconciliation with the so-called perennial tradition.  Inasmuch as none (save perhaps the meek) can claim ownership of the world, this pluralism is as it should be.  Sitting beneath the common stars or around a common fire, each of us must work to wed his or her own myths of meaning to the vast creation encompassing us all.

The Phenomenon of Humanity: Priesthood 

Without falling into anthropocentrism, a future Barfieldian/Teilhardian vision must continue the quest for understanding and appreciation of the phenomenon of humanity.  Both Barfield and, to a lesser degree, Teilhard suggested a particular place for humanity as discerned through the study of cosmic evolution.  Looking especially along the lines that Barfield has expounded, we come to see human beings playing a special role, at least at this point in history, as the bearers of meaning for the whole cosmos.  Meaning, once experienced as spread throughout nature, so Barfield says, has contracted from the peripheries into personal centers within Homo sapiens.  It is the task of humanity, through the process of re-integration, to restore to nature her meaning; as Novalis famously put it, "Humanity is nature's messiah."[15]

Traditionally, this human role has been referred to as the priesthood of man, or better, the priesthood of humanity.  The species we call Homo sapiens, having evolved the capacity of reflection and the concomitant capacity for appreciation, is the cosmos having become conscious of itself.  Humanity is evolution able to wonder at its own beauty.  Once again we are confronted with the task of perception, perception this time around of beauty, wonder, awe and meaning.  In the still response of human beings prostrate in wonder the universe moves, at last, towards its completion.  As Annie Dillard suggests:

We are here to witness.  There is nothing to do with those mute materials we do not need.  Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it…We do not use the songbirds, for instance… We can only witness them–if we were not here they would be like songbirds falling in the forest.  If we were not here, material events like the passage of seasons would lack even the meager meanings we are able to muster for them.  The show would play to an empty house, as do all the falling stars which fall in the daytime.  That is why I take walks: to keep an eye on things.[16]

Approaching this same idea from the standpoint of classical theology, Robert Farrar Capon comes to much the same conclusion.  About humanity, he writes:

I intend to define humanity–Adam–as the historical animal, as the being with a strange thirst for the gist of things.  I want to refresh the sense of the priesthood of Adam, to lift up once more the idea of human beings as the priests of creation, as the offerers, the interceders, the seizers of its shape and the agents of its history… the beholder and offerer of its meaning.[17]

Such a concept is, at least, present imaginally in Teilhard, as well.  In his early essay, "The Priest", written in the trenches of World War I, he says, "Since today, Lord, I your priest have neither bread nor wine nor altar, I shall spread my hands over the whole universe and take its immensity as the matter of my sacrifice."[18]

It is also possible to approach this concept through Barfieldian lenses.   In such a vision, the movement from original participation to integration is a movement towards an ever-fuller priesthood.  Humans become priests as they offer the whole of the created order, people and places, stones, statues and singing larks, to God through the use of the imagination coupled with love.  As meaning contracts from the peripheries into personal centers within human beings, the scope of humanity's priesthood is widened.  Increasingly, as we more fully integrate, the priestly role of humanity, that directionally-creator relationship to the world, takes center stage as we in cooperation with the divine become the enactors and enablers of meaning.

The Symbol of the Seventh Day 

In her marvelous book, Living by Fiction, Annie Dillard reminds us that in days gone by it was non-fiction more than, say, the novel or the poem that was considered the pre-eminent literary and artistic form.  "If you wanted to write significant literature," she insists, "if you wanted to do art or make an object from ideas–you wrote non-fiction."[19] It's a pity that Barfield and Teilhard both wrote in the time when, as Dillard says, "[we] think of non-fiction as sincere and artless," for it is art even more than idea that elevates the work of both authors.  At end, having taken in all their logic, their careful argumentation, their historical documentation and philosophical citations, it is finally the imaginative force of their works that endures.  These are artful systems, full of beauty, poetry and coherence, and apart from which the ideas of Barfield and Teilhard would have hardly warranted dismissal, much less the attention and praise of a Saul Bellow or Dag Hammerskjold.  Principally, this artistic force can be discerned in the use both authors make of an encompassing and guiding metaphor that looms large as the goal of their systems: Omega Point, whispers Teilhard with reverence, while Barfield paints with words a world of Final Participation.

The new Barfieldian/Teilhardian synthesis needs to find its own guiding metaphor, a symbol capable of engaging the imaginations of those who encounter it.  While integration, as a term, is more precise than final participation it lacks the imaginative power of, say, Teilhard's Omega.   What needs to be found is yet another guiding metaphor capable both of seizing the imagination and retaining the best elements of Final Participation and Omega Point.  Moreover, this new symbol must not only be a guiding metaphor but also a concluding one.   Much of the imaginative vitality of Teilhard and Barfield's visions can be traced to their narrative quality.  There is a compelling beauty to both Omega Point and Final Participation, a completeness that elicits satisfaction and desire.

Teilhard, it seems, borrowed much from Dante when it came time for him to conceptualize Omega and so, in proposing my own guiding metaphor for a Barfieldian/Teilhardian synthesis, I feel justified in shamelessly borrowing from the halls of tradition.  The great biblical symbol of the Sabbath might serve to unify a new narrative for the evolution of consciousness.

This is not to suggest that biblical teaching on the Sabbath is a teaching regarding the evolution of consciousness.  It is not.  However, the biblical content of the Sabbath-symbol does make it a particularly evocative and appropriate final metaphor for the evolution of consciousness.  In suggesting this I am not making a biblical or theological argument; rather, I am making an aesthetic one.  Having said this, how does the Sabbath function as a guiding and concluding metaphor for our narrative of the evolution of consciousness?

The first reason to look at the Sabbath's lies in its biblical role as the archetype of creation's culmination.  Jurgen Moltmann comments extensively on this subject. "The goal and completion of every Jewish and every Christian doctrine of creation," he says, "must be the doctrine of the Sabbath; for on the Sabbath and through the Sabbath God  'completed' his creation… The Sabbath opens creation to its future."[20]  To the extent that our vision continues the express Christianity of Barfield and Teilhard, it only makes sense to consider the Sabbath as an appropriate symbol, moreover, as the appropriate symbol.  In seeking a metaphor that will continue the narrative function of both Teilhard's Omega Point and Barfield's Final Participation, the Sabbath stands almost alone within the semantic world of Judaism and Christianity.  In the same way that Omega Point provided the narrative capstone of Teilhard's evolutionary vision, so too the Sabbath functions as the dénouement of biblical creation making it the perfect choice for our new symbol.  Furthermore, unlike Barfield and Teilhard's metaphors, the symbol of the Sabbath comes already invested with a sense of accumulated meaning and evocative power built over centuries of linguistic use.

It is not only the culminating function of the Sabbath that interests us, however, for the content of the symbol touches on so much that we want to emphasize in a Barfieldian/Teilhardian synthesis.  The Sabbath, for example, is as much an element of consciousness as of material creation.  As Moltmann explains, not only did God complete his creation on the Sabbath, but also "on the Sabbath and through it, men and women perceive as God's creation the reality in which they live and which they themselves are."[21]  The Sabbath, as Abraham Heschel goes to great length to say, is a point in time, and therefore more of a state than a space.  This is the nothing if not the language of consciousness.

However, while the Sabbath exists in time and in consciousness, it can not be mistaken for a disembodied or Platonic goal.  Rather, to a far greater extent than are either the symbols of Omega Point or Final Participation, the symbol of the Sabbath is absolutely continuous with the creation.  It is not relegated to an ethereal heaven or, as Teilhard was wont to do with his Omega, assumed without differentiation wholly into the being of God.[22]  To the degree that the Sabbath transforms this world, this Earth, and does not flee it, it has similarity with evolutionary vision which is also concerned with the transformation of this livable, earthly creation.

There are yet more reasons to choose the Sabbath as our guiding metaphor.  As our synthesis makes clear, both Barfield and Teilhard perceive evolution as a growth in love (participation and union, formulated in our conception of integration through love) and liberty (Barfield's picture of consciousness freeing itself from the dominance of given meaning, and Teilhard's picture of human consciousness freed in its radial ascent from the decay of tangential forces, formulated in our Law of Form and Freedom).  The Sabbath too, is an image of love and liberty.  Moltmann notes that Israel bequeathed to humanity two great images of liberation: the exodus, with which most are familiar, and the Sabbath, still too little understood.  The exodus is the symbol of external freedom but, and here it is in total harmony with the evolution of consciousness, "the Sabbath is the symbol of inner liberty."[23]  The symbol of the Sabbath is the symbol of freedom within consciousness, of rest and quietude and inner harmony with God's creation.

Finally then, the Sabbath is an image of love, that state of mutual indwelling and participation in which both Barfield and Teilhard see the culmination of the whole drama of cosmic evolution.  We remember the problems created by Teilhard's unresolved positivism, problems that led him denigrate other species and to evaluate creation based on utility for hominization.  The Sabbath vision of love and participation entirely avoids these pitfalls.  On the Sabbath, all members of creation–from the working ants to the giant sequoias to human beings in their huts and houses–dwell together in perfect, interdependent harmony.  On the Sabbath, every being in creation finds its place.  The participation that Barfield is so concerned with manifests itself not only epistemologically but externally and ethically in the material relationships of all being with one another. 

The Sabbath does not negate all hierarchy (for hierarchies, as evidenced in dynamic systems theory, are a part of creation) but negates the destructive elements of any hierarchy.  On the seventh day, only the Sabbath is king and all other creatures dwell together in fraternal unity.  Too often Christians have forgotten this and have presumed that Man was the capstone of creation.  The view of Genesis is far different.  There humanity does not even get a day to itself and Adam is created on the sixth day along with antelopes and azaleas.  The capstone of creation, as Rabbi Heschel was fond of saying, is the Sabbath.  This is the place of full and mutual participation, where everything belongs.   Adopting the symbol of the Sabbath as the goal of our evolutionary vision preserves us from the errors of anthropocentrism allowing us to survey all of creation and to say, with God, that is all very good.

The Sabbath draws us into this perception and consciousness, a felt sense of participation and appreciation.  As Moltmann says, "The celebration of the Sabbath leads to an intensified capacity for perceiving the loveliness of everything… because existence is glorious."[24]  In Barfield's vision the contours of reality are seen ever more clearly by an evolving and enlarging consciousness, by a greater and freer conscious union with the Logos.  So too here can we imagine creation sparkling in the eyelight of Sabbath-consciousness.  On the Sabbath, the conscious (final) participation of all of creation both with itself and with the indwelling divine spirit is complete. As Rabbi Heschel says:

The Sabbath, thus, is more than an armistice, more than an interlude; it is a profound conscious harmony of man and the world, a sympathy for all things and a participation in the spirit that unites what is below with what is above.  All that is divine in the world is brought into union with God.  This is Sabbath, and the true happiness of the universe.[25]

More than an armistice, more than interlude, the Sabbath stands as an intoxicating dream, firing our imaginations with that zest for life required if we are to participate in furthering the evolution of consciousness towards such a noble goal.  We began our investigation with a look at progress, the great modern theme, whose imaginative power surely allowed the birth of visions like Barfield's and Teilhard's.  However, we conclude with our own vision that, though it can be called progress, has little to do with the technical utopias imagined by nineteenth century men and twentieth century marketers.  The Sabbath vision has little to do with mechanics and everything to do with, as Gary Snyder might say, the evolution of new-old ways of relating, being and seeing, the re-integration of the cosmos into the newfound freedom of human consciousness.  Ultimately, it transforms our vision of the evolution of consciousness into a vision of the evolution of love.