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 One
From Bacon to Barfield: the “Great Myth” of Evolution

Is evolution a theory, a system, a hypothesis?  It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true.  Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.[1]

 Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man

It is a fact. . . that anyone who has once contemplated the evolution of the earth and man as a progress from unity to fragmentation and from meaning to meaninglessness, and then, if all goes well, from meaninglessness through to meaning and from fragmentation through to unity, will see traces of that universal process wherever he looks.[2] 

Owen Barfield, The Rediscovery of Meaning

Before we can turn our attention to the evolutionary visions of Owen Barfield and Teilhard de Chardin specifically, it is necessary to understand the common milieu out of which both of their visions emerged.  Since the birth of modernity humanity has increasingly abandoned a static conception of the universe in favor of a more dynamic, evolutionary view.   Even the Roman Catholic Church, historically rather slow to change, has officially acknowledged and adopted this view.  The Vatican II document, Gaudium et spes No. 5, notes that, “The human race has passed from a rather static concept of reality to a more dynamic, evolutionary one.”[3]  Novel as the intricacies of their systems may have been, neither Barfield nor Teilhard conceived of their evolutionary systems in a vacuum.  Rather, a much larger cultural dialogue, a context already ripe with dynamic, developmental speculation, nourished the conceptions of both authors.  Bearing this in mind, before we can turn our attention wholly to Teilhard and Barfield in subsequent chapters, we must first have a grasp of this shared intellectual inheritance of theirs.   To understand either of them, their goals and their content, they must be situated in the larger cultural history of evolutionary and developmental speculation.  In subsequent chapters we will look at the ascent of consciousness as outlined by Owen Barfield and Teilhard de Chardin respectively; for now however, we must look at the ascent of the idea of ascent itself. 

Most readers will be aware that progress cannot be summarily equated with development or with evolution, nonetheless the concepts are historically intertwined.  To historically understand one we must understand the others as well.  This initial chapter then, is primarily historical.  First, we will look at the progressive/developmental/evolutionary currents prevalent in today’s culture noting their importance and their historical novelty.  We will then turn attention back a few hundred years in order to chronicle the origin and ascent of such ideas.  Finally, we will introduce Barfield and Teilhard, setting them in their proper places within this intellectual history. 

The “Great Myth”

One of the more carefully guarded truths today, or so it seems, concerns the relative originality of some of our most cherished notions.  Whether this occurred by design or default remains unresolved.  What is clear however, is that most are content to suppose ideas like liberty, equality or even romantic love to have been eternally self-evident.  The truth of the matter is simply that they have not been–in fact, to earlier generations these concepts were far from self-evident.  Along the same lines and more to our point, the idea of development/evolution/progress is a mere four hundred or so years old.   And yet, those four hundred years have been enough to give to the ideas of evolution, progress and development a privileged place.  They stand, at least in the West, as common sense—maybe even as a mark of our civilization.  Does civilization evolve?  Are we progressing?  Moderns are tempted to silence such questions matter of factly with a phone call, a fax or by drawing attention to the airplanes now passing overhead.  As the cultural critic Neil Postman notes, “To most of us, progress is not a theory; it is a fact.  Perhaps not a fact of nature (although Darwin’s theory suggests that it is), but a fact of human history.”[4]

C. S. Lewis and the Myth of Modernity

In one of his essays, C. S. Lewis called this common sense notion, “the Great Myth.” In his mind, evolutionism and developmentalism must be recognized for what they are: myths, pure and simple.[5]   There are two sides to his statement.  On the one hand, he demonstrates that, though it claims to be based on objective reasoning, common sense, and scientific evidence (a la Darwin), evolutionism is actually mythical.  Lewis argues forcibly that, “In making [the myth] Imagination runs ahead of scientific evidence.  ‘The prophetic soul of the big world’ was already pregnant with the Myth: if science had not met the imaginative need, science would not have been so popular.”[6]  He shows the concept of developmentalism already inherent within Romantic literature from Keats’ Oceanus (forty years before Darwin’s landmark publication) to Wagner’s Wotan. Evolution is a myth because, long before it appeared in Darwin or was accepted by science, it was germinating in the mythopoeic imagination.  Furthermore, the myth and the biological theory are not one and the same.  “In the science, Evolution is a theory about changes; in the Myth it is a fact about improvements.”[7]

On the other hand, Lewis notes that evolution is a myth in the sense that it has been the animating story for nearly two centuries of Western civilization.[8]  Lewis hardly feels the need to marshal much proof here, so patently self-evident was the assertion in his time.  It is demonstrable everywhere from the novels of H. G. Wells to the peculiarly American fascination with novelty that de Tocqueville noted with wonder in his voice.  As we shall see, the myth has suffered some setbacks in our own time—Lewis himself proposing to bury it once and for all—but it has persisted in the popular imagination.[9]  The resurgence of the film's popularity and its theatrical re-release now that the twenty-first century has finally received is testament to the powers of marketing, yes, but also to enduring mystique of the progress-myth which lies at the center of the film.

There are, of course, other cultural evidences.  One need look no further than contemporary politics to see the myth played out, writ large in the letters of political rhetoric.  The assumption that liberal, free-market democracies ought to be spread throughout the world, an animating core of American identity, is nothing more than a politicized version of the progress myth.  Assuming that the liberal democracy is the most highly evolved form of government, the myth reassures us that it will gradually be adopted by all peoples and all lands.  In the last decade a particular form of the progress myth has incarnated itself in NAFTA, WTO, the European Union and the Uruguay Round of GATT.  The progress myth manifests itself as well in modern predilection for social movements.  Whether it be the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, the environmental movement or some other such entity, all of these share this one, central myth of progress.  It is in the very name ascribed to them: a movement is, by definition, in motion, heading towards some omega, some goal usually interpreted as bettering society.  The myth is everywhere around us—from child liberation to democratic ideals to unbridled faith in the high technology economy.  Indeed, this Great Myth has, during its ascendancy, become one of the most powerful narratives of modern society.

A final note about our terminology. Lewis considers progress to be a myth—indeed, a great myth—because it one, had its genesis in the imagination and two, is a meaning making story.  When Lewis uses the term however, there is also a third implicit sense: that progress is a myth because it is untrue.  Lewis doesn’t argue this case; it simply comes out in his tone.  This is where one must part ways with Lewis.  Progress is indeed a great myth according to Lewis’ first two senses (it had its genesis in the imagination and it is a meaning making story) but by themselves, these characteristics need not make it false.  Indeed, it is one of the false myths of today that true knowledge always and only comes first from empirical observation, never finding its genesis in the imagination or intuition.  The history of science, at least, proves otherwise.  Imaginative and intuitive leaps are the primal stuff of real discoveries.  This is how hypotheses originate. Einstein famously put it, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”  The task of critical minds, whether scientists, historians, philosophers, cultural anthropologists or Einstein, is to determine the veracity of these imaginative hypotheses through accepted methods: observation, experimentation, logical reasoning, mathematical proofs, historical investigation.[10]  

While, the jury is still out on whether or not the hypothesis of progress holds up under such conditions, for three hundred years the idea has met with a phenomenal level of cultural acceptance.  The theory of progress and its cousins, evolutionary speculation and developmental speculation, may prove to be mythologies that are untrue, but this remains to be seen.  What we do know however, is that progress is a myth inasmuch as it has dominated our cultural imagination and search for meaning.  It has given shape to centuries of scientific, technological, ethical, political and artistic effort.  In that sense, progress may still be our great myth.

The Land Before Progress

It was not always so.  Indeed, for most of human history the ideas of evolution, development or progress were simply unheard of.  It was not that they were rejected; rather, they had not yet been invented.  In considering this, we will be aided by J. B. Bury’s seminal work, The Idea of Progress.  With painstaking care he demonstrates the novelty of the idea, its absence in the ancient world, its modern origins and subsequent development.  As Bury notes:

The idea of human Progress then is a theory which involves a synthesis of the past and a prophecy of the future.  It is based on an interpretation of history which regards men as slowly advancing—pedetemtim progredientes—in a definite and desirable direction, and infers that this progress will continue on indefinitely.[11]

Bury’s first task is to demonstrate that the idea of progress was entirely absent in the ancient world.  For example, he looks at the civilizations of Greece and Rome where, if anywhere, one would have expected the idea of progress to be articulated.  These civilizations achieved such heights of glory—philosophically, mathematically, artistically and politically—that it would seem a natural thing for them to speak of progress.  “It may, in particular,” says Bury,  “seem surprising that the Greeks, who were so fertile in their speculations on human life, did not hit upon an idea which seems so simple and obvious to us as the idea of progress.”[12] 

The great minds of ancient Greece were not ignorant of their achievements, but they did not see them as the cumulative effect of advancing knowledge.  Nor, on the other hand, did they suspect that their own works would build a foundation for future advance.  The ancients held a cyclical view of time.  They perceived humanity as involved in an endless tide, a cycle of seasons that come and then must go in what Mircea Eliade called “the myth of the eternal return.”[13]  Bury explains this further, drawing attention to the Greek word Moira, usually translated fate.  For the ancients, Moira was thought to be an ultimate force, inescapable and controlling all things.  Neither humans nor gods were free from its stranglehold, a condition that necessarily cut short any attempt to think progressively. 

Though committed to a cyclical vision of the universe, the ancients, to say nothing of the medievals, did in fact do history and there seems to be, in these histories, some concept of development.  Aeschylus, for example, described humanity living in dark caves and finally finding freedom in Prometheus’ gift of fire and the Roman historians certainly spoke of the rise of the empire out of barbarism and chaos.  Bury maintains, however, that the concepts present in such histories can not be equated with our modern notion of progress.   Telling the story of Rome's rise shows nothing because, in the ancient mind, along with the rise of empires came their subsequent and inevitable demise.  If a golden age was conceived of, it was almost inevitably located in the past, an Eden from which we have fallen.  A particularly memorable illustration of this can be found in the vision of Daniel two.  The seer pictures a statue with a head of gold, chest and arms of silver, belly and thighs of bronze, legs of iron, and its feet a mixture of clay and iron, and describes this statue as representing the tide of history.  In doing so, the seer has perfectly reflected the historical notions of the ancient world regarding human civilization—i.e., that it has deteriorated gradually from gold to clay.  If a future golden age was conceived of, it was attained (as in Daniel’s vision) through the cataclysmic intervention of some deity not, and this is the crucial point, as a result of gradual, historical ascent. 

The genesis of the idea of progress is sometimes located within the Abrahamic religions.  Mircea Eliade, for example, contrasts the ancient vision of cyclical return with the Jewish vision of history.  He notes that, in Judaism, for the first time, we find weight given to historical events in and of themselves.  The Hebrews discerned in these events the actions of God and found themselves necessarily valuing history as such.  As Eliade states, “It may, then, be said with truth that the Hebrews were the first to discover the meaning of history as the epiphany of God, and this conception, as we should expect, was taken up and amplified by Christianity.”[14]  But, as Bury asks, is this monotheistic history really the idea of progress?  Bury concludes otherwise, preferring to call this the idea of providence.  Providence is a teleological or eschatological move based on the actions of the divine, whereas progress involves an inevitable journey onward and upward based on solely natural causes. 

Bury’s work is a landmark, and though subject to revision here and there, his central theses stand firm.[15]  It is true that in recent years, some have attempted to disagree with him, most notably Robert Nisbet in his History of the Idea of Progress.  Nisbet claims that Bury’s vision is flawed, that in fact the ancient world did conceive of progress.  Far from only believing in a fall from the golden age, Nisbet asserts that, “there were from the beginning Greeks and Romans who believed the very opposite, that the beginning was wretchedness, that salvation lay in the increase of knowledge.”[16]  Most of Nisbet’s book is concerned with chronicling this belief in progress, held in his view seamlessly from classical times through to our very own.  Nisbet is, however, far less convincing than Bury and a number of scholars have rightly criticized his work.[17]  David Hopper speaks for many when he says:

Nisbet himself offers little original research to establish the viability of his interpretation.  Much of what he offers expands on fragments of material which, though they can be readily understood within a cyclical pattern of historical meaning, he chooses to read as examples of the eighteenth century concept of an inclusive movement of moral, social, and material advance.[18]

There is some irony in concluding that, when it comes to histories of the idea of progress, newer may not be better.  And in fact, Bury’s 1932 work, predating Nisbet’s by almost fifty years, remains the standard in the field.[19]  With Bury, we conclude that for nearly six thousand years of recorded history the idea of progress was nowhere to be found.

Modernity and the Invention of Progress

"Every age of the world has increased, and still increases, the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue of the human race.”[20]  So said Edward Gibbon, one of the greatest historians in the 18^th century, in his landmark, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.   Here Gibbon articulated a thoroughgoing belief in progress.  What happened to insert this idea so powerfully into the imagination and intellects of modern men and women? Teilhard de Chardin speaks of the day “when one man, flying in the face of appearance, perceived that the forces of nature are no more unalterably fixed in their orbits than the stars themselves, but that their serene arrangement around us depicts the flow of a tremendous tide—the day on which a first voice rang out, crying to Mankind peacefully slumbering on the raft of Earth, ‘We are moving!  We are going forward!’”[21]

It seems that day was a long time coming, but that its dawn (and with it the dawn of the idea of progress) broke sometime in the early seventeenth century.  The idea grew in content and clarity and was finally articulated in the eighteenth century and subsequently rose to a great efflorescence in the nineteenth.  If pressed to name Teilhard's ecstatic traveler, the individual in the West who first awoke to the idea of progress, Francis Bury would certainly point to the great Francis Bacon.

The Birth of Progress: Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was one of the giants of the scientific revolution.  His insistence on the primacy of the experiment as the key to unlocking nature’s secrets became a guiding principal for all subsequent science.  This principal was the foundation upon which the scientific method was built, a method that gave to humanity a way of measuring and ensuring the advance of knowledge.  Often reviled in fashionable intellectual circles today, we must still admit that Francis Bacon’s goal in putting nature 'under duress that she might yield her truths' was a noble one.  He dedicated all of his work to the advancement of “the happiness of mankind.”[22]  In the late sixteenth century, when infant mortality was high, epidemics still devastated the landscape (in 1563, two years after Bacon’s birth, over one quarter of London was wiped out by the bubonic plague) and doctors were awash in archaic superstitions, Bacon’s scientific utilitarianism was happy news indeed.  And it is this goal, the increase of human happiness, that indicates the beginnings of the idea of progress.

Bacon, along with others like Descartes or Fontenelle, was involved in a contest of sorts, between the seventeenth century thinkers and the ancients.  The issue concerned the question of authority—to whom is authority rightfully ascribed?[23]  Was contemporary opinion correct in granting greater respect to the authors of antiquity simply because of their age?  Bacon, of course, sounded a resounding No! at this point.  “In this connection,” Bury says:

Bacon points out that the word ‘antiquity’ is misleading, and makes a remark which will frequently recur in writers of the following generations.  Antiquitas seculi inventus mundi; what we call antiquity and are accustomed to revere as such was the youth of the world.  But it is the old age and increasing years of the world—the time in which we are now living—that deserves to be called antiquity.  We are really the ancients…[24]

It is this sort of rhetoric that Bury claims anticipates and paves the way for the theory of progress.[25]

Progress Articulated: the Encylopedists and the Marquis de Condorcet

By the eighteenth century, the idea of progress had come into its own.  It was no longer simply science that progressed, but history itself was seen as moving inevitably forward.  The  French Encylopedists, especially Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert, played an important part in disseminating this view.  The composition of the Encyclopedia (1751-1765) stands as one of the great achievements of eighteenth century France.  It was not only a compendium of knowledge, but propaganda as well, serving as a powerful tool in the “war” against superstition and authority.  The Encylopedists were united in their hope for universal, future improvement—a vision of social and moral progress commencing side by side with scientific and technical advance.  Bury notes that “most of them had… a more or less definite belief in the possibility of an advance of humanity towards perfection.”[26]  This optimism was almost axiomatic for them, based on “an intense consciousness of the Enlightenment of their own age”[27] coupled with their conviction that human progress was held back only by social institutions, lack of education and economic opportunity.  All peoples and races were equally capable of Enlightenment and progression.  In short, nurture was the only hindrance; nature was entirely on the side of progress. 

The Encylopedists, as a whole, definitely held a developed concept of progress, but they used the word infrequently and hardly reflected on it much at all.  Their concern, like that of Francis Bacon whose name they invoked, was utilitarian: l’utile circonscrit tout; “the useful circumscribes everything.”[28]   The championing of progress itself was left to others. 

This champion was found in Condorcet, a political revolutionary and the youngest contributor to the Encyclopedia.  “The most complete and moving expression of this faith in progress,” as Charles Frankel notes, “was the marquis de Condorcet’s Equisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain [Sketch of a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind], written in 1793.”[29]   The Sketch is essentially a chronicle of humanity’s progressive rise from environmental and socio-historical bondages.   “Such observations upon what man has been and what he is today,” says Condorcet:

will instruct us about the means we should employ to make certain and rapid the further progress that his nature allows him still to hope for.

Such is the aim of the work that I have undertaken, and its result will be to  show by appeal to reason and fact that nature has set no term to the perfection of human faculties; that the perfectibility of man is truly indefinite; and that the progress of this perfectibility, from now onwards independent of any power that might wish to halt it, has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has cast us. This progress will doubtless vary in speed, but it will never be reversed as long as the earth occupies its present place in the system of the universe, and as long as the general laws of this system produce neither a general cataclysm nor such changes as will deprive the human race of its present faculties and its present resources. (Italics added)[30]

This is essentially Bury’s definition of the idea of progress—the indomitable ascent of humanity.  Keith Michael Baker notes furthermore, that in articulating this, “Condorcet bequeathed to the nineteenth century the fundamental idiom of its thought, the idea of progress.”[31] 

Spirit and Progress: Hegel and the Idealists

The idea of progress, as Condorcet described it and Bury defines it, flourished among thinking people of the nineteenth century.  As Nisbet notes, “[Nineteenth century] philosophy was literally saturated in the temper of progressivism.”[32]  True, there were already dissenters—notably the Romantics and especially, Rousseau.[33]  Then there was the great anticipation and subsequent tragedy of the French Revolution which lead to a revival of conservative, Catholic thought.  But through it all, the spirit of the age remained a progressive one.  German Idealist philosophers like Herder, Kant and von Baader reflected on the difference between revolutionary development and evolutionary development (Entwicklung).  It is in this context that George W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) must be considered.

Bury considers Hegel’s teaching more closely allied to systems of providence rather than of progress.  Nevertheless Hegel does articulate a vision of history very much in resonance with the dominant ideas of progress then sweeping Europe.  Hegel’s vision perceived the Absolute Spirit progressively manifesting itself (coming to know itself) while moving, epoch after epoch, from nation-state to nation-state in an historical dialectic.  Each period was characterized by one dominant nation and, its ideas were ruled by one spirit of the  age.  “The East,” Hegel says, “knew, and to the present day knows, only that One is free; the Greek and Roman world, that some are free; the German world knows that All are free.”[34]  Hegel compared history to an aging process wherein the first period (the East) was childhood, the second was youth (Greece) and manhood (Rome), and finally the third period (medieval and modern) was a vigorous old age.[35] 

The old age metaphor betrays what separates Hegel’s vision from what Bury considers a truly progressive one: the problem is that, as far as Hegel is concerned, history comes to an end with Hegel.  The Absolute Spirit, so he assumes, is satisfied at last in Hegel’s own philosophy and history thus, effectively comes to an end.  No more possibility for development exists.  The classic example of what this does to Hegel’s system is found in Hegel's view of history and the nation state.  For Hegel, the pinnacle of political development is the nation-state, Hegel’s Germany, though everything in his dialectic should have led him to envision some future league of nations or world government. Hegel’s vision then, according to Bury, is pseudo-progressive because it affords no real place for the future. 

A second difference between Hegel and previous advocates of progress is that Hegel’s view of history, while certainly ethnocentric and rather deluded, maintains a strong sense of continuity.  Charles Frankel notes that “this new kind of historicist philosophy rejected the… sharp dichotomy between the present and the past that had been [previously] made by believers in progress.”[36]  In this way, Hegel’s vision closely anticipates the notion of evolution.[37]

Positivism, Materialism and Progress: Comte and Marx

 No survey of the history of the idea of progress would be complete without a treatment of Auguste Comte (1798-1857). Like Hegel, Comte saw history being propelled forward often in a dialectical manner; however, for Comte it was not Absolute Spirit at work but the veritably “law of progress.”  He identified three stages through which history moved: the theological, when humanity described the world through appeal to deities; the metaphysical, when humanity abstracted the deities and appealed to forces or essences;  and finally,  the positivist-scientific age, Comte’s own, when humanity at last subjected itself to positive facts.  Comte considered his own great contribution to progress to be the invention of the science of sociology which he believed would establish social, moral and religious values scientifically.  As Bruce Mazlish notes, “According to Comte, people did not argue over astronomical knowledge, and, once there was true social knowledge, they would not fight over religious or political views.”[38]

Though Comte ended his life with the embarrassing creation of a positivist religion–replete with positivist holidays and saints, church services and songs, all of which alienated most of his friends and supporters–he nevertheless left a profound and inescapable mark on the nineteenth century.  As Bury summarizes it, “Auguste Comte did more than any preceding thinker to establish the idea of Progress as a luminary which could not escape men’s vision.  [Comte’s massive system] was a great fact with which European thought was forced to reckon.  The soul of this system was Progress.”[39]

Finally, mention must be made of Karl Marx.  Comte may have done more than any to establish the notion of progress, but Marx’s treatment of the subject gave rise to the most significant repercussions.  Any who doubt the cultural dominance and relevance of the idea of progress need only look to Marx.[40]  Apart from Marx, the history of the twentieth century would be unrecognizable.  Marx’s dialectical materialism co-opted Hegel’s thought, but turned it on its head by jettisoning Hegel’s metaphysical speculations.  In the language of the dialectic, Marx was a synthesis of Hegel and Feuerbach.  Marx echoes both Hegel and Comte in his preoccupation with the inevitable forward thrust of history.  Instead of Comte’s three phases of history, Marx delineates five historical epochs.  Progression from one phase to the next is the result of class conflict which, in dialectical manner, forces history onward.  Four of the phases have already come to pass: first the primitive communal, followed by the slave epoch, the feudal epoch, and at present, the capitalist epoch.  Marx predicts a final step, the communist epoch which is to come. 

Interestingly, like Hegel, Marx's faith in progress is not unbounded.  While he is never sure of when the communist epoch will emerge, though doubtless it will, he asserts that progress will cease at this final phase.  He reasons that once communism is established, the conflict between classes will end and with conflict terminated so goes all impetus towards future development.  Progress will be no more and history will have ended.

The Rise of Evolution

In the mid-nineteenth century, in the midst of widespread belief in the march of progress, an English amateur naturalist published the now indispensable, The Origin of Species.  In so doing, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) introduced “evolution” to the world at large.  As we will see below, in the twenty-first century, we distinguish between evolution, development and progress.  This is a helpful distinction, but it was not one that Darwin himself ever made.  In fact, Darwin uses the terms interchangeably—evolution here, development there, biological progress elsewhere.[41]  The point is that the idea of progress formed the matrix out of which latter evolutionary and developmental theories sprung.  For this reason, it is important that the history of the idea of evolution be integrated with the history of the idea of progress.

This is not to say that the legitimacy of scientific evolution or Darwinism[42] is necessarily tied to faith in progress—as a scientific postulate, the theory of evolution rises or falls on empirical evidence not philosophical supposition.  But evolutionary science and progressivist faith have often run in the same pack.  The scientific theory of evolution is about change, increasing complexity or development (properly nuanced, of course) but it is not necessarily positive.  Scientists for example, point to evolutionary developments that result in hyper-trophy (over development or monstrosity) and can even lead to extinction.  Most often, this scientific picture of evolution (change, ultimately both positive and negative) was the view articulated by Darwin.  However, Darwin was inconsistent and sometimes expressed a more progressive vision—a view of evolution leading somewhere pleasant and desirable, even perfect.  “ We may feel certain,” he wrote in The Origin of Species:

that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the world.  Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of great length.  And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.[43]

While Darwin himself rarely speculated on what this progressive evolution might mean or look like, it was inevitable that others should fill the master’s silence.  Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer, for example, created frightening pictures of cultural dominance based on their confidently detailed visions of social evolution. 

The English word, evolution, is derived from the Latin, evolvere, which originally meant to unroll or roll forth.  It was used, for example, to describe the action of unrolling a scroll.  As scrolls were replaced with codices, the word evolvere fell out of favor.  Later, evolvere  was rediscovered by the Cambridge Neoplatonists of the seventeenth century.[44]  Leo O’Donovan notes that, for the Neoplatonists, evolvere “referred to the entire unfolding of historical time which is simultaneously present to God.”[45]

Idealistic Evolution

Cambridge dons were not the only Idealists interested in the idea of evolution a the nineteenth century German usage of the word Entwicklung (as we saw, for example, in Hegel) demonstrates.  This Idealist approach to evolution perceived Spirit at work, evolving itself through the process of history.  Men like J. G. Herder and Friedrich Schelling developed this evolutionary view through the temporalization of the chain of being.[46]  The schema described, in Platonic terms, an initial involution (sort of a deliberate self-forgetting or kenosis) of the Absolute followed by the unfolding of Spirit, its gradual, historical ascent towards reunion with Itself.  Effectively, this concept turned Plotinus' traditional neo-Platonism on its side, the vertical ascent of Spirit occurring in the horizontal of history.[47]  This Idealist evolution of the Absolute culminated, for Herder at least, in the individual human who could recognize the Absolute within himself. Idealist philosophy however, even Herder’s, did not necessarily result in a theory of biological evolution, though some of the German Romantics (notably Goethe) did toy with the idea.  However, most of the thinkers indebted to Idealist concepts of evolution continued to emphasize development through discontinuity, especially where biology was concerned, which is still a far cry from accepted science.

Scientific  Evolution

The first biological use of the word evolution was to describe embryogeny and,  today in fact, there are still those who believe growth in the womb to be a sort of miniature model of life’s evolution; as is often said: ontogeny precedes phylogeny.  Darwin, as we have seen, used the word along with others like progress and development to illustrate his theory.  Herbert Spencer seized upon the word with an exclusivist zeal, forcing it upon the public imagination in a way that has remained ever since.  Today, in the popular mind, evolution means Darwin.

Darwin was not the only biologist competing for claim to the word, however.  The biologist Jean Baptiste Lamarck produced his own theory of evolution decades before Darwin’s.  Lamarck, a scientist of incredible breadth, did his most significant work as a botanist and a zoologist.  It was while working in the field of invertebrate zoology that Lamarck developed his evolutionary theory which proposed that complex forms emerged from simple ones through a process of environmental difficulty and subsequent adaptation.  In this view, a creature confronted with unfavorable conditions exerts effort to adapt to its situation and this adaptation is subsequently passed on to its progeny.  A favorite example is that of the giraffe whose ancestors, it was imagined, found themselves struggling to reach leaves upon high trees. These short-necked creatures voluntarily stretched their necks as they strove for food and this slightly elongated neck was past on to their descendants.  Over many generations the length of their neck grew until finally resulting in the speckled creatures of African savannas.

Lamarck’s theories were not much appreciated during his own time but enjoyed a revival after Darwin’s publication.  For a while, Darwinism and Lamarckism sparred with each other, vying for dominance.  Lamarck was eventually discredited however, and Darwin carried the day. 

Darwin was heavily influenced by the economical theories of scarcity proposed by Thomas Malthus (1798) and drew upon him in the articulation of a theory of evolution. Malthus' theory was crafted in the heyday of 19^th C. industrial expansion and concluded bitterly that the poor had no one to blame for their condition but themselves.  Darwin picked up on this and, whereas Lamarck placed emphasis on acquired characteristics and adaptation, Darwin pointed to natural selection, what Spencer later described as the “survival of the fittest.”[48]  Put crassly, Lamarckism is adaptive; Darwinism, competitive.

Subsequent developments in scientific evolution have included Mendel’s breeding experiments and the development of the field of genetics, deVries discovery of mutation as an agent of evolution (though he mistook it for the agent), the synthesis of evolutionary theories which has resulted in a distinct field of scientific study, evolutionary science (popularized by the likes of Julian Huxley and, more recently, Stephen Jay Gould) and the merging of evolutionary science with systems theory a la Gregory Bateson.  The scope of evolutionary theory is indeed wide.  As O’Donovan realizes, “One often notices that theologians vacillate between the classical, “idealist” meaning of the term and the modern, ‘scientific’ meaning.”[49]  Such confusion of meaning is not limited to theologians however, and appears frequently anywhere outside of the hard sciences.[50]

Philosophical Evolution

Before closing this section on evolution, it is important to look at the twentieth century adoption of the word in philosophy.  A number of theorists, from Alfred North Whitehead to the psychologist C. Lloyd Morgan, in the early twentieth century attempted to wed their visions with evolutionary thought.  For our purposes, however Henri Bergson may serve as the best representative of this large movement.  Bergson’s attempt to unify evolutionary theory and philosophy can be seen in his work Creative Evolution, published in 1911. As T. A. Goudge notes, “Bergson was born in the same year that The Origin of Species was published, and the revolutionary implications of this work affected his thought.  He accepted the historical reality of evolution, but rejected attempts to explain it in mechanistic or mechanical terms.”[51]  What Bergson advanced was a picture of the cosmos evolving through the agent of an élan vital (life-force).  It was through an appeal to this life-force that Bergson explained history’s circuitous route towards progress.   The life force struggled upwards through various branches, some effective, some dead-ends, as it sought to manifest itself in increasingly complex or “higher” forms.  Not only did this explain the circuitous picture of historical development, but Bergson felt it satisfied the unresolved question regarding the emergence of systems of irreducible complexity like Darwin’s eye or, more recently, Michael Behe’s biochemical cellular structures.

Bergson’s theory was purportedly based on biological data but to most observers, he appeared to go beyond the evidence.  Furthermore, scientists have often criticized Bergson’s biology as more Lamarckian than Darwinian in character.  Nevertheless, he remains important for his philosophical treatment of evolution and for his place in the history of progress-theories.  Bergson’s evolution might at first glance look similar to the schemes of the German Idealists but his differs importantly in allowing for trial and error in the historical process.  This is a critical nuance on the progress myth that brings it into a more realistic correspondence with lived experience than the determinism of Hegel or the blind faith of Comte and Condorcet.

Barfield, Teilhard and the Evolution of Consciousness

It is now, during this time contemporaneous with Bergson, that we come, at last, to our two authors.  Each is indeed the inheritor of the evolutionary/developmental myth, there is a sense in which they receive this parcel from opposite ends.  Teilhard’s immediate influences are more along the lines of Darwin, Bergson and the scientific establishment; Barfield, on the other hand, comes from the tradition of Goethe, Hegel and Romanticism in general. 

In looking at these emphases however, it is important not to be reductionistic.  The complexity of thought in both Barfield and Teilhard reflects many, not just one, of the previously examined approaches to evolutionary and developmental theories. For example, inasmuch as these authors speak about more than just evolution but an evolution of consciousness, they stand necessarily in the tradition of German Idealism.  We recall that, for the Idealists, evolution emerged as a temporalization of the chain of being.  This allowed for an inclusion of consciousness that has heretofore been neglected by the prevailing positivism of most scientific evolution.  Consciousness, by its nature, rails against objectivity and quantification, relishing instead subjectivity and qualitative judgments.  But Barfield and especially Teilhard also perceive that this evolution of consciousness is intrinsically bound up with physical evolution.  Science has not succeeded in reducing the mind to the neo-cortex, but it has produced irrefutable evidence of their connection. At least in this world, mind and matter seem to necessarily co-exist in a dynamic relationship. When Barfield and Teilhard, aware of this connection, speak of the evolution of matter or forms, they are standing in something less like Idealism and more akin to scientific evolution.

Barfield and the Romantics

Barfield arrived at his idea of the evolution of consciousness while deeply engaged in philological study.  He had as a young man been intrigued by the “felt change of consciousness” that certain poetic passages could produce in him.  “At about the age of twenty,” he says, “there was a sudden rapid increase in my appreciation, particularly of lyrical poetry… it became a much more powerful, immediate experience.”[52]  This fascinated him, opening a wider, more wonderful world towards which he turned in a quest for meaning.  This search became the impetus for his Oxford B.Litt. thesis, published later under the title, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning.  Barfield has said that the title is misleading and that the book is really about “a theory of poetry as a form of knowledge.”[53]  Barfield’s study of poetry lead him to the Romantic notion that mind does not only look at the world but, as Wordsworth said, half-perceives and half-creates it.

While still penning Poetic Diction Barfield was simultaneously at work on a second book, History in English Words.  Like Poetic Diction, this book does more than its simple title suggests; it propounds not only a history of words and their meanings but, given the weight Barfield ascribes to poetry as integral to human knowing, it deduces from philological study a powerful theory of evolution in human consciousness.  As G. B. Tennyson describes it:

One could say it is the study of etymology raised to the level of philosophy.  In examining the changes in words and word meanings over time Barfield came to the realization that words and language evolve, not in a crude Darwinian way from simple to complex but in the sense of growing, enlarging… differentiating themselves into a variety of different meanings.[54]  

Barfield claims that these changes in meaning are more than just the simple concretization of a word, but are reflective of actual changes in consciousness.  The ancients didn’t just use words more imperfectly than we (as common opinion supposes) while describing the same sort of experiences and perceptions that we moderns have.   Instead, as Barfield notes, taking the ancients (literally) at their word, their felt experience, their primary perception, was itself radically different than ours.  They didn’t just think like we do but with different thoughts; rather, they had an altogether different way of thinking which is reflected in their language.  To study the history of words then, is to study the history or evolution of consciousness.

Taking his theory even further, Barfield deduced a direction to this evolution. The change is from an archaic state of immersion in the environment (original participation) in which the outer world was not much differentiated from one’s inner self and both were alive with the same spirit, to the development of self-consciousness and the awareness of duality and separateness (alienation).  Looking to the horizon, Barfield sees a further development, a healing of the rift between self and environment, but a healing which preserves the differentiated self that evolution has labored to bring forth (final participation). 

We claimed that Barfield stood most fully in the tradition of German Idealism/Romanticism. There is of course a notable Hegelian flavor to Barfield’s dialectic–

original participation : alienation : final participation

–which points to his affinity with German metaphysics. There is also however, much that is out and out Romantic in Barfield.  Within his own teaching, for example,  Romanticism holds a place of honor as a crucial development in the evolution of consciousness, a signpost leading us towards final participation.[55]  Barfield was especially fond of Coleridge whose philosophy was the subject of one of his most scholarly works.[56]  Likewise, Barfield was also fond of Goethe whose evolutionary theories were alluded to above. 

Barfield not only teaches about the Romantics but is appreciated as a Romantic, or at least neo-Romantic, himself.  His work, Poetic Diction, has attained a cult-classic status among many poets (Howard Nemerov called it a ‘sacred book’[57]) and it aided in reviving respect for the Romantic tradition as a whole.  R. J. Reilly sums up Barfield’s Romanticism well:

Owen Barfield [brought] to nineteenth-century romantic thought a measure of respectability it had lost in the early years of this century… [Barfield’s work] is itself romantic… a continuation but a modification of the romantic tradition…  It is not too much to say that he is a spokesman for romanticism, that he gives a kind of contemporaneity to older romantics, so that they often seem to be speaking through him.[58]

Perhaps this is illustrated best through an appeal to the title of one of Barfield’s many books: Romanticism Comes of Age.

That book brings us to a final influence whom we must consider when talking about Barfield and evolution, for in Romanticism Comes of Age Barfield’s association with Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy, is made clear.  Barfield never met Steiner and only saw him in person once when, on a trip with his good friend Cecil Harwood, Harwood convinced Barfield to attend a lecture by Steiner in the area.  Barfield was instantly but begrudgingly intrigued by the resonances he perceived with his own work.  He describes his reactions to Steiner’s teaching in the beginning of Romanticism Comes of Age:

Three things in particular struck me most about anthroposophy.  The first was that many of the statements and ideas which I found there produced an effect similar to the combinations of words to which I have already alluded… The second was that, so far as concerned the particular subject in which I was immersed at the time, that is the histories of verbal meanings and their bearing on the evolution of human consciousness, Steiner had obviously forgotten more than I had ever dreamed… The third was that anthroposophy included and transcended not only my own poor stammering theory of poetry as knowledge, but the whole Romantic philosophy.  It was nothing less than Romanticism grown up.[59]

Evaluating Barfield’s involvement with Steiner’s teaching is difficult.  On the one hand, Barfield never shies from pointing to and praising Steiner.  On the other hand however, Barfield is no Steiner, and his work is almost always far more appetizing to non-anthroposophists than Steiner’s.  The truth is that Barfield was well on his philosophical way before he ever encountered anthroposophy.   As Patrick Grant observed, “It is important to note that Barfield did not begin as an Anthroposophist, but had gone some way in exploring his own ideas on the evolution of consciousness before he encountered Steiner.”[60]   There may well have been a Barfield very similar to the one we know even had there never been a Steiner.

One of the primary differences between Steiner and Barfield is where they choose to stop.  Barfield thinks cautiously and clearly about epistemology, imagination and the evolution of consciousness.  While Steiner can be systematic and accessible (eg., his Philosophy of Freedom and early writings on Goethe), most of his writings are based on his experiences as a clairvoyant, and they are filled with spiritual readings of history, accounts of telluric and planetary evolution, the age of Atlantis, the journey of a soul after death, secret gospels, etc.  It is not surprising that the academic community has shied away from Steiner.  Patrick Grant understates the phenomenon when he says, “Steiner is characteristically clear, explicit and assertive at points where Barfield is not… [Barfield] tends to avoid those aspects of Steiner’s teachings which seem insufficiently anchored in ordinary experience.”[61]  This, in itself, eliminates a significant portion of what might be considered the baggage of anthroposophy and goes a long way to explaining the credibility with which Barfield seems to speak. 

In one of Barfield’s philosophical fictions, World’s Apart, the character Sanderson is an anthroposophist and, though he isn’t Barfield’s primary, fictional alter-ego, he does represent an aspect of Barfield in the book.  At one point, Sanderson explains his approach to Steiner and it is surely Barfield’s voice that we hear when he says:

[Steiner’s work] can be divided roughly into three categories.  First, anything he said that I myself have both understood and tested or experienced in some way.. Secondly—perhaps the largest—the things I feel I more or less understand but can not say I have ever tested or experienced… And thirdly, the things I can’t really say I understand.

After having thus divided Steiner’s teaching, Sanderson explains his approach to handling each of these various categories:

We needn’t bother with the third.  As to everything he said that comes in the second category, though I may have come to accept it for good reasons of my own as undoubtedly true, it would never come naturally to me to repeat it without making its provenance clear, or as though I were speaking in my own person.  The first is another matter.  After twenty years or so [of studying Steiner] it is really impossible to distinguish.  It is as much Sanderson as Steiner—in the sense that it would be absurd to accuse me of thinking as I do, because Steiner thought it also… It may be because historically speaking, but, as Hunter [a C. S. Lewis alter-ego in the fiction] has emphasized, any rational thinking stands or falls on its own merits.[62]

Barfield often wondered how so many could seem to admire his ideas without caring for a moment to investigate Rudolf Steiner.  It does not seem so confusing, however, for while Steiner may indeed have said many of the things Barfield does (and there is much entirely original in Barfield, too), Steiner also said so much more.  It is this ‘more’ that still disqualifies Steiner from consideration in the minds of many. 

Barfield’s evolutionary influences—Romanticism, German Idealism, and Rudolf Steiner—affected him powerfully, but his teaching was his own.  He discovered evolution in the history of words and considered that he had not happened upon an interesting piece of intellectual history, but rather that he had stumbled into a natural phenomenon.  No less than the paleontologist with his shovel and bones, Barfield felt he was digging up the past and this etymological investigation has as much or more to say about the phenomenon of conscious than the bones and potsherds of history. 

For Barfield, evolution was a concept that encompassed nearly everything.  If the phenomenal world is, as Kant pointed out, dependent upon the categories and archetypes we bring to it then changes in consciousness affect changes in phenomena.  This causes Barfield’s whole world, the phenomenal world and not just the internal world, to be evolutionary.  A final note is in order.   Although, in Barfield's view, the entire cosmos evolves, Barfield’s God does not.  He puts it very strongly in the essay “Lewis and/or Barfield” where he declares, “Barfield never held, and does not hold now, that ‘God evolves.’  He does hold that the relation of man to God is something that evolves, continuously evolves.”[63]  For Barfield, evolution is something that occurs throughout creation.  The uncreated God on the other hand, is the great agent of evolution, present in the process but never subject to it.

Teilhard and the Scientific Tradition

Teilhard is in love with the idea of evolution, even more than Barfield.  It is hard to overstate his commitment to the idea or his fascination with it.  As a young man, Teilhard seized upon the natural world, science and later, evolution, with the same sort of fervor that Barfield felt towards poetry.  However, whereas Barfield was an Englishman and, in good British fashion, put at least a bit of a bridle on his passions, Teilhard was a Frenchman whose passions ran wild and sometimes excessively.  There is some irony in this, for it is Barfield whom we ascribe primarily to the Romantic tradition and Teilhard whom we place in the tradition of the scientific establishment.

The influences upon Teilhard are easy to trace. He often alluded to the two early impulses that were forever vying for his attention and devotion—namely, matter (represented in the world and science) and spirit (represented in his mother’s devotional faith and later, his own Jesuit spirituality).  In his early life, these two forces seemed always at loggerheads.   As he says, “The truth is that even at the peak of my spiritual trajectory I was never to feel at home unless immersed in an Ocean of Matter…”[64]  This immersion lead Teilhard, while still training as a Jesuit, to be deeply  involved in the study of geology as well.  Early in his Catholic career he taught the subject at a Jesuit school in Egypt and took every opportunity to engage in field research, marveling all the while at the majesty of the Egyptian landscape and sediment.  Despite this scientific enterprise however, Ursula King notes that, “In a contribution to an article on ‘Man’ in a Catholic apologetic dictionary published in 1911, Teilhard still took a predictably traditional, rather dualistic stance against evolution.  But that was soon to change.”[65]

Trying to discover from whence the idea of evolution forced itself upon his consciousness, Teilhard mentions the name of Henri Bergson as significant.  “I can remember very clearly the avidity with which, at that time, I read Bergson’s Creative Evolution.”  He adds however, “that the only effect that brilliant book had upon me was to provide fuel at just the right moment, and very briefly, for a fire that was already consuming my heart and mind.”[66]  That fire was the concept of evolution, a concept that Teilhard first latched on to not for scientific reasons, but for philosophical ones.  “That magic word ‘evolution’, which haunted my thoughts like a tune,” became for Teilhard the key to unifying the cosmos, for bringing together Matter, Life and Energy.[67]  In short, evolution was the means by which Teilhard healed his felt childhood rift between the world and the Spirit.

Teilhard was not content to simply speculate philosophically—he was too practical for that—and soon plunged himself into evolutionary science, becoming a respected geologist and paleontologist.  He even contributed to some of the important evolutionary discoveries of the twentieth century: for example, the unearthing of Peking Man which Teilhard supervised.  In fact, during his lifetime, it was Teilhard the scientist that was most public.  He spent his entire life engaged in scientific employ but never ceased thinking theologically and philosophically about evolution.  Evolution was, quite literally a religion for him.  Like Barfield, Teilhard everywhere presents evolution as something that affects the nature of the relationship between humanity and God.  For him, it is the key to this relationship.  Unlike Barfield, Teilhard seems at times to go even further and to postulate God’s own involvement in evolution; that is to say, there are times at least, when Teilhard’s God looks like he is evolving.[68] 

Even more so than Barfield, Teilhard combines in himself the gamut of evolutionary thought we have chronicled in this chapter.  An eminent paleontologist, his indebtedness both to Darwin and to the broader currents of scientific evolution is plain.  But there is more to him.  His vision of the evolutive universe is (as we shall see in the following chapter) one of directed evolution, the cosmos falling forward towards Spirit, drawn along by the presence of the Omega Point (Christ) in the future.  It is in this sense that Teilhard begins to sound much like the German Idealists.  Finally, Teilhard is not shy of the idea of progress.[69]  He calls progress a force, a fact of nature and he says unequivocally, “I am convinced that it is upon the idea of progress, and faith in progress, that Mankind, today so divided, must rely and can reshape itself.”[70]

Conclusion   

In the latter part of the twentieth century, the Great Myth, as Lewis called it, fell upon hard times.  Lewis himself set out to bury it once and for all and he was not alone in such an endeavor.  Progress has certainly had its critics.  Outside of the hard sciences, it is all the vogue to dismiss any developmental or evolutionary theory as so much bunk or worse, as a racist, colonial, or totalizing form of thought.

Indeed, for developmental thinkers the academic climate is chilly.  Many seem to think that progressive, evolutionary or developmental theories are simply untenable in light of events like Hiroshima or Three Mile Island.  But one must not overstate the opposition.  A number of critical  thinkers continue to espouse some sort of developmental view including James Fowler, Jurgen Habermas, Michael Polanyi, Jean Gebser and other luminaries who can hardly be accused of post-modern obsolescence.

What is obsolete is the unmitigated faith in human progress of someone like Condorcet or Comte.  A century of record bloodshed, to say nothing of disasters like Chernobyl and the ecological crisis, has awakened humanity to its own potential for destruction.  Ever since we crossed the threshold of thought, evolution has become increasingly a matter of choice. Until then, we might suppose, it was more or less automatic (at least, out of our hands).  However, with the emergence of self-consciousness and reflection, humanity left the domain of the beasts and has come to wield a greater freedom and a greater power. Development and evolution involve what Jurgen Habermas has called a dialectic of progress;[71] with each advance—whether scientific, technological, or cultural—there is increased potential both for good and for ill, a fact recognized by Barfield and sometimes, when he was at his best, by Teilhard.  Both authors managed to look at history however, and see a pattern and direction to the chaos.  When asked what he thought the new millennium might hold, Barfield responded:

Well, I'm an optimist in the long run, but a pessimist in the short.  The ecological situation is really quite bad.  And society is more fragmented than ever, even with this 'information age' we never hear the end of.  I'd like to think we’ll avoid a catastrophe, but I don't know… But I'm certain we're moving into a new stage of consciousness… People are beginning to feel a sense of unity.  What we need is the time for this to spread, for more people to become aware of it.[72] 

We recall that Lewis pronounced the funeral of the Great Myth but the works of Barfield, Teilhard and others suggest that Lewis' pronouncement may have been premature.  Though confidence in progress has been shaken, hope (even of the evolutionary kind) is not destroyed.  For those interested in wedding evolutionary thought with Christian faith, there can be few more profitable areas of investigation than the works of Teilhard de Chardin and Owen Barfield.  It is to they that we now turn our attention.