An Ever Diverse Pair: Chapter One

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

The full meaning of words are flashing iridescent shapes like flames—ever-flickering vestiges of the slowly evolving consciousness beneath them.[1]

The idols are tough and hard to crack, but through the first real fissure we make in them we find ourselves looking, how deeply, into a new world! If the eighteenth-century botanist, looking for the first time through the old idols of Linnaeus's fixed and time-less classification into the new perspective of biological evolution felt a sense of liberation and of light, it can have been but a candle-flame compared with the first glimpse we now get of the familiar world and human history lying together, bathed in the light of the evolution of consciousness. [2]

Set among his more famous friends and fellow Inklings, Owen Barfield has often been overlooked by the general public, but rarely by those who know his work. Giants in their field—from the poets Howard Nemerov, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, to the philosopher Gabriel Marcel, to the quantum physicist David Bohm—have all found Barfield’s work to be of surpassing value. James Hillman, pioneer of archetypal psychology, calls Barfield, "One of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century."[3] R. J. Reilly sees Barfield as perhaps the most consequential of the Inklings and considers that when the literary history of our time is written, Barfield will be discussed as a matter of course.[4] Lionel Adey, after setting out eagerly to study Lewis and running into Barfield along the way, summarized his estimation of both writers:

It is with trepidation, therefore, that I express the belief that though Barfield’s books… will never attract so wide a readership as the far more numerous books by Lewis, they will be read longer and to more profound effect… That Barfield’s thought is both more original and more profound I have come to believe while studying these controversies… I have come to think him the more important figure.[5]

Barfield intended at some point to write a magnum opus but unfortunately never brought that desire to fruition. Despite this, all of his works display a remarkable cohesion of thought. He says of himself, “It is often the case that thinking people change substantially. There is an earlier Wittgenstein and a later Wittgenstein, there is an earlier Heidegger and a later Heidegger, an earlier D. H. Lawrence and a later D. H. Lawrence, but there’s no earlier Barfield and later Barfield.”[6] Indeed, nearly every book in the Barfieldian corpus is more or less about the evolution of consciousness. One however, stands out. Of all his books, the one that most approaches the stature of his never-realized-magnum-opus is Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry and therefore, will serve as our primary reference with regards to Barfield’s thought.

As with Teilhard, we will approach Barfield’s work through a series of three movements. First, we will have recourse to look at Barfield’s methodology. His linguistic-philosophy is less familiar to most than Teilhard’s phenomenological approach and we will therefore have to spend some time tackling this subject. Second, we will look at Barfield’s cartography of the evolution of consciousness. Like Teilhard did, and as any historian must, Barfield chronicles a series of stages or epochs in the evolution of consciousness. Through an examination of these stages we will not only see Barfield’s chronology of consciousness, but will also be given a window into crucial Barfieldian concepts and vocabulary. Finally, Barfield too, like Teilhard, has a Christological component to his evolutionary vision. For him, Christ is primarily the Logos of God and in our last section we attend to Barfield’s treatment of this theme.

Thomas Kuhn suggested that scientific revolutionaries will often be amateurs, forced by the novelty of their views to the sidelines of professional discussion.[7] Such, it would seem, is the sort of marginalized place of honor held by Owen Barfield. Apart from visiting professorships at a number of universities, Barfield never held an academic appointment. His professional career was, in fact, as a London solicitor—28 years of legal work during which he was all but silent. This marginalization however, has had its benefits. Existing on the outside, Barfield was able to cultivate a strikingly original and comprehensive vision, something that radically questions societal beliefs and blazes a promising trail forward.

Much of the novelty of Barfield’s work derives from his unorthodox methodology. It is not unorthodox in the sense of being sloven, obscure, or indefensible—indeed, Barfield’s intellectual moves draw much of their force from seeming so plainly obvious. Barfield's obvious methodological moves however, remain almost universally ignored. As a character in one of Barfield’s fictional dialogues says, “The obvious is the hardest thing of all to point out to anyone who has genuinely lost sight of it.”[8]

The methodological suppositions that were obvious to Barfield but that our culture has, for the most part, entirely lost sight of are threefold. The first has to do with Barfield’s treatment of language; the second, Barfield’s integration of disciplines; and the third, Barfield’s recognition that consciousness must be the lens through which we approach reality. While we have divided these three for clarity’s sake, each supposition is connected intimately with the other so that together they form a coherent, Barfieldian approach to the whole of reality.

If Barfield has one great philological insight it would perhaps be this: words, even ancient ones, are “symbols of consciousness.”[9] That is to say, we use language to express our consciousness: we say that we are sad, happy or fearful; we say that we perceive a sunset to be beautiful, sublime, or threatening, or that we feel hot, ecstatic, queasy, etc. The use of such words extroverts an interior experience; they symbolize consciousness. Not only do words symbolize consciousness, but to some extent, they regulate consciousness. Anyone who has genuinely and thoroughly learned another language can testify to the effect it has on shaping one’s view of the world. To really understand the Hebrew mind, for example, one probably needs to speak Hebrew—maybe one even needs to dream in it.

That words symbolize consciousness is not a radical one but combine this perception with a study of etymological history and startling repercussions emerge. Examining semantic history, Barfield discovered a pattern everywhere present in the historical transformation of word meanings. Words, he says, universally begin as references “both to an object or event in the sense-world and to a content which is inner or mental.”[10] Think, for example, of the current usage of the word heart which can mean, among other things, both the cardiac organ and the center of human emotions. Nearly all words that today carry abstract meaning (say, spirit, understand, right, wrong, sadness, etc.) can be traced to an earlier stage in which they also carried some sort of concrete meaning (the original sense of sadness, for example, meant sated or heavy, while wrong referred to something sour).[11] This is in itself is no great revelation and is a standard etymological conclusion. As Barfield says, “This is a fact. It is not a brilliant aperçu of my own, nor is it an interesting theory which is disputed or even discussed among etymologists. It is the sort of thing they have for breakfast.”[12]

What they don’t have for breakfast though, is Barfield’s seemingly obvious but entirely novel interpretation of this event. Words are symbols of consciousness and therefore, Barfield suggests, the reason old words carry a dual meaning (simultaneously having what we would consider to be internal and external referents) is because ancient people experienced in the world just such a wedding of the inner and the outer—to be more precise, the ancients had not yet divided inner and outer. Etymological investigation suggests that, for the ancients, the inner and the outer were dissolved into (or had yet to emerge from) a greater, coherent whole. Orthodox etymological studies however, almost universally assume that there must have been some still earlier, primordial language (the proto-proto-language[13] ) with words referencing only concrete objects—something for which Barfield insists there is absolutely no evidence.

Perhaps this will become clearer through the use of an example. The words pneuma and spiritus, as most Bible students quickly learn, can today mean either spirit or wind or breath. Received etymological wisdom suggest that in some postulated primordial language spiritus must have meant only wind or breath. Later on, in the course of development, it is suggested, a novel human decided to use spiritus as a metaphor to express the ‘principle of life’ and thereby injected the word with its double meaning.[14] Barfield responds:

All that can be replied to this is, that such an hypothesis is contrary to every indication presented by the study of the history of meaning; which assures us that such a purely material content as ‘wind’, on the one hand, and on the other, such a purely abstract content as ‘the principle of life…’ are both late arrivals in human consciousness. Their abstractness and their simplicity are alike evidence of long ages of intellectual evolution.[15]

Instead of this, Barfield suggests taking the evidence as it is and assuming that the ‘principle of life’ is no later metaphor but is rather derivative from the earliest meaning of spiritus. He invites us to imagine “a time when ‘spiritus’ or pneuma… meant neither breath, nor wind, nor spirit, nor yet all three of these things, but when they simply had their own peculiar meaning, which has since, in the course of the evolution of consciousness, crystallized into the three meanings specified.”[16]

Thus Barfield comes to the following startling conclusion: words are symbols of consciousness and words follow a universal pattern of change throughout history therefore these semantic changes reflect changes in consciousness. The world of the ancient Greeks was not, as ours is, one of inanimate gusts of wind and introspective spirits—the world was a place of pneuma! “The full meaning of words,” Barfield explains, “are flashing iridescent shapes like flames—ever-flickering vestiges of the slowly evolving consciousness beneath them.”[17]

Etymologies are the fossils of evolving consciousness. Whereas Teilhard found his evidence for such evolution first in the study of paleontology, Barfield discovered his artifacts in the colored histories of words. Furthermore:

There is a difference between the record of the rocks and the secrets which are hidden in language: whereas the former can only give us knowledge of outward, dead things—such as forgotten seas and the bodily shapes of prehistoric animals and primitive men—language has preserved for us the inner, living history of man’s soul. It reveals the evolution of consciousness.[18]

The shape of this evolution will be addressed below but we see hints of its outline already in the semantic changes discussed above. Like words, consciousness has moved from an experience of an animated, meaningful world to a more individualized one. Barfield describes it, “In my own field, everything points to an evolution of consciousness, which, up to as recently as three or four centuries ago, has mainly taken the form of a contraction of meaning and therefore of consciousness—an evolution from wide and vague to narrow and precise, and from what was peripherally based to what is centrally based.”[19]

It is important to stress that these conclusions regarding the evolution of consciousness are conclusions based on philology. Barfield’s primary methodological innovation is this philosophical approach to philology. As G. B. Tennyson says of this method, “One could say it is the study of etymology raised to the level of philosophy.”[20] Barfield himself admits nearly as much in the introduction to the second edition of Poetic Diction where he claims to present, “not merely a theory of poetic diction, but a theory of poetry: and not merely a theory of poetry, but a theory of knowledge.”[21]

It is impossible to understand Owen Barfield’s work without appreciating his passion for coherence. This passion is manifest in the way in which Barfield’s philology moves quite naturally into philosophy proper, that is, the study of consciousness—but Barfield’s passion went further still. Indeed, it wasn’t just philology and philosophy that he desired to unite, but all disciplines.

In his fictional dialogue World’s Apart, the character Burgeon (representing Barfield) expresses his envy to an academic friend, Hunter. Burgeon tells Hunter how much he would like to be in an environment like the academy:

To live in a world where contemporary minds really meet. A Senior Common Room that boasts an eminent biologist, a Hebrew scholar, an atomic physicist, two or three philosophers, a professor of comparative religion, a chaplain, a Freudian psychologist and a leading anthropologist, with Law and English Literature thrown in for good measure, and all dining and wining together nearly every day! What amazingly interesting conversations you must have![22]

Such a fabled room however, it turns out, is just that—a fable. Hunter informs Burgeon that the Senior Common Room is nothing like that at all. “Actually,” he says, “no one ever talks shop to the other fellow.” This realization prompts Burgeon’s thought:

I was not, after all, it seemed, shut out from a large freemasonry of discourse where acute minds really met and got down to first principles. Except perhaps for a few undergraduates here and there (who are at the disadvantage of not really knowing anything about anything), there was probably no such world…. It was then that I had my rash idea.[23]

In World’s Apart, that rash idea is to gather just such a meeting of minds for a weekend’s dialogue within a Dorsetshire cottage. However, what for Burgeon was a weekend of dialogue in Dorsetshire, was for Barfield a lifetime’s dialogue taking place, first and foremost, within his own mind.

Barfield’s knowledge was encyclopedic. Though his expertise was in philology and literary criticism, he read widely and seems to possess a working knowledge of, at least: philosophy, psychology, theology, comparative religion, anthropology, areas of biology, as well as recent developments in theoretical physics. His ability to almost seamlessly integrate these varied disciplines ensures Barfield’s place as one of the great integral thinkers of the last century.

Barfield saw this integration as particularly important today because of the profound disjunction between certain fundamental disciplines that has become, at least for the last two hundred years, part of the status quo. He describes it:

Physical science has for a long time stressed the enormous difference between what it investigates as the actual structure of the universe, including the earth, and the phenomena, or appearances, which are presented by that structure to normal human consciousness. In tune with this, most philosophy—at all events since Kant—has heavily emphasized the participation of man’s own mind in the creation, or evocation, of these phenomena.[24]

This is nothing new. It is, to paraphrase Barfield’s earlier comment, what philosophers and physicists have for breakfast. This basic understanding however, “is always left out of account in our approach to any subject outside the sphere of physics—such subjects, for example, as the history of the earth, the history of language, the history of thought.”[25]

Barring certain contemplative or Eastern psychologies then, there is a gulf, a yawning chasm between what everybody knows while studying particular disciplines and what is treated as absolutely certain from any other point of view. In one of his great images, Barfield describes a man in different parts of a library pursuing his various intellectual quarries. In one room, he learns about philosophy, neurology or physics. He moves on then to other rooms for the study of history or evolution. Using this imagery, Barfield explains the crux of his integral approach, “In particular I decline to forget [what I learned from the philosophers] when I try to fix my attention on such matters as evolution and history, and the relation between them. I refuse to forget, when I am in that room in the library, what all those philosophers and neurologists and so forth taught me in the other rooms, namely, that what we perceive is structurally inseparable from what we think.”[26]

All of this—the philosophical approach to philology, recognition of the evolution of consciousness and the attempt at a sustained dialogue or integration of various disciplines—led Barfield to the philosophical approach he describes as objective idealism. Objective idealism is a sustained recognition of the role of the observer in the construction of the observed. Barfield turns to objective idealism as an attempt to reconcile the given of physics—atoms, quanta, quarks—and the given of our perception—the texture of this paper, for example, or the smell of spring air. He describes it through the analogy of a rainbow:

Look at a rainbow. While it lasts, it is, or appears to be, a great arc of many colors occupying a position out there in space. It touches the horizon between that chimney and that tree; a line drawn from the sun behind you and passing through your head would pierce the center of the circle of which it is a part. And now, before it fades, recollect all you have ever been told about the rainbow and its causes, and ask yourself the question Is it really there?[27]

Answering such a question is a bit more difficult than it at first seems. We know for instance, from experience, that the position of a rainbow moves as we, the observers, move. The rainbow, as we see it, sits on the horizon. However, if we are driving while gazing at this rainbow, we know that as new hills, barns or buildings emerge the rainbow will take its place on the horizon behind them. Most of us have long since recovered from the disillusionment of discovering that the end of the rainbow and its concomitant pot of gold simply can never be reached no matter how hard we try. As Barfield says, “reflection will assure you that the rainbow is the outcome of the sun, the raindrops and your own vision.”[28]

So the rainbow is not there in the sense of occupying a place in space, and yet when we see it we consider it neither as a sign of encroaching madness nor as a divinely bestowed vision. A rainbow is perceivable by others and not limited to a single individual's vision. Barfield says, “the practical difference between a dream or hallucination of a rainbow and an actual rainbow is that, although each is a representation or appearance (that is, something which I perceive to be there), the second is a shared or collective representation.”[29] The rainbow is subjective, but collectively so; as Husserl would say, it is inter-subjective.

All of reality, Barfield asserts, is analogous to that rainbow. Kant pointed out that even space and time—to say nothing of greenness, bitterness, or for that matter, treeness—are phenomenal categories that we bring to the noumena. The world of the physicist—the world of quantums, quarks and particles—is not the world of experience. A person reading this text does not see particles; rather, he or she sees words written in twelve point, Times New Roman, double-spaced. As William Blake wrote in his poem, The Mental Traveler, “The eye altering alters all.”[30]

Importantly, Barfield insists that the rainbow analogy is simply an analogy—the correspondence is not exact. He is not saying that, “the solid globe is as insubstantial as a rainbow.”[31] Perhaps the best way to explain this aspect of Barfield’s objective idealism is to contrast it with what is meant by subjective idealism (for which the rainbow and the globe are similarly insubstantial). Barfield describes it this way:

I think the general position of subjective idealism is that there are two kinds of idealism, one being a Platonic idealism where the ideas are conceived as having a kind of independent, separate existence of their own, whereas subjective idealism treats ideas as a subjective process in individual human minds but nevertheless, in the development of this philosophy, it presents them as being more real than the objective world… You can say, then, that the subjective idealists see the two disjunctively: either you believe in Platonic Ideas or you believe in ideas more in the modern sense, but nevertheless also conceive of those ideas as being in some way as real, or more real, than the objective world.[32]

The Platonic idealist sees trees swaying in the wind and imagines them to be imperfect copies of the perfect tree, which exists, as it were, only in the archetypal realm (or, for Bishop Berkley, in the mind of God). For a subjective idealist, on the other hand, the tree is an idea of her own, one that she then experiences. If there really is anything besides his idea at all, it is inconsequential in comparison with the idea. At the end of his book Worlds Apart, Barfield symbolizes this stance in the picture of a man with a box for his head and lights streaming out of his eye holes. In contrast to this position, Barfield’s objective idealism recognizes the fundamental reality in both the ideas and the so-called objective world.

Objective idealism contends that that disjunction [between idea and world] is itself an unreal one, and that reality, individual being, however you think of it, consists in the polarity between the subjectivity of the individual mind and the objective world which it perceives. They are not two things, but they are one and the same thing and what you call the objective world is merely one pole of what is a unitary process and what we call subjective experience is the other pole, but they are not really divided from each other.[33]

In short, when we perceive trees, there is something there (call it, the unrepresented, particles, or the Ding an sich) or else we would see precisely nothing. However, apart from perceptions and conceptions there is no tree to speak of, simply the unmanifest. Furthermore, both the manifest (including the perceptions and conceptions upon which it depends) and the unmanifest are themselves part a larger, grand, non-dual whole. The world as we experience it is entirely dependent on the interplay between objective given and subjective perception. This viewpoint Barfield symbolizes in the picture of a man with no head at all. Why? Because the duality between inner and outer (symbolized by the head) no longer poses a problem–it has been transcended. The world is non-dual.

Objective Idealism rests on the absolutely essential Barfieldian concept of polarity.[34] Following Coleridge, Barfield feels that any understanding of the world—especially an understanding of the pivotal relationship between subject and object—must rely on the development of polar logic. “Polar contraries,” he says, “(as is illustrated by the use of the term in electricity) exist by virtue of each other as well as at each other’s expense.”[35] For example, the north and south poles of a magnet, while contrary, can not exist apart from one another. Cutting the magnet in half, even exactly in half, only results in the creation of two smaller magnets, two north poles and two south poles.

In Barfield’s objective idealism, subject and object analogously exist in this sort of polar relationship. Contrary to a popular misconception, polar logic is not dualistic for the subject and object are understood as contraries, themselves are part of a greater whole. They are, so to speak, the north and south poles that make the single magnet of reality. Expounding on Coleridge, Barfield says:

Polarity is dynamic, not abstract. It is not ‘a mere balance or compromise,’ but ‘a living and generative interpenetration.’ Where logical opposites are contradictory, polar opposites are generative of each other—and together generative of new product. Polar opposites exist by virtue of each other as well as at the expense of each other… Moreover, each quality or character is present in the other. We can and must distinguish, but there is no possibility of dividing them.[36]

Granting the difficulty of polar thinking, Barfield concedes that “it is not really a logical concept at all but one which requires an act of imagination to grasp it.”[37] Moreover, “the apprehension of polarity is itself the basic act of imagination.”[38]

To return to the example of perceived trees, such trees are neither subjective nor yet objective, but exist as part of a unified continuum that includes and transcends such apparent dualisms as subjective and objective, inner and outer, spirit and matter, noumenal and phenomenal. Such trees do not have independent existence but neither are they simply a product of one's individual consciousness alone. This relationship can be expressed in the following formula:

Barfield calls our part in this process which results in the recognizable world, figuration. Figuration involves two movements: First, one's sense organs are related to the particles so as to give rise to sensations. Sight needs to be ‘tuned in’, so to speak, to light, and smell to scent, hearing to sound, etc. Second, these sensations are combined and constructed by the observer’s mind into recognizable and nameable objects we call ‘things’.[39] On this point, Bishop Berkeley was right. Apart from figuration there are no things—esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived.[40] Because there is relative agreement on what is perceived (the familiar world), we can therefore, call the phenomenal world the collective conscious.

What about what is not perceived? The unrepresented—what we have been calling the particles, what Aristotle would have called potentia and what David Bohm calls the implicate order—in Barfield’s view this is the unconscious or, since it is a shared reality, the collective unconscious.[41] The term 'collective unconscious' needs clarification particularly with regards to its popularization through Jungian circles. Barfield thinks it ironic that Jung’s collective unconscious should have enjoyed such popularity in a culture that refuses to “even admit the possibility of a collective conscious—in the shape of the phenomenal world.”[42] Barfield contends that his universal unconscious differs from Jung’s in at least one important respect: Jung’s unconscious (and the archetypes contained therein) “are neatly isolated from the world of nature with which, according to their own account, they were mingled or united.”[43] Because the phenomenal world is the collective conscious (and therefore necessarily arises out of the unconscious matrix), Barfield’s collective unconscious is not constrained from interacting with the phenomena. The collective unconscious and the phenomena exist in a relationship of polarity and it would be a great surprise (indeed, a catastrophe) if one pole failed to interact with the other.

Recognizing the debt the phenomenal world owes to consciousness, that is, to figuration, leads one to the concept of participation. Barfield defines participation as “the extra-sensory relationship between man and the phenomena.”[44] If we accept that the role of the observer involves figurating the phenomena, then we must admit a sense in which we the observers see something of ourselves in, for instance, a grove of trees. That is, to the extent that we see trees and not particles we see our own consciousness. We are present within the trees, participants in its nature.

In a moment, we will explore participation as it occurs in early or “primitive” humankind. In such environments participation is the rule and is everywhere recognized. Early civilizations felt themselves present within the phenomena in a way moderns do not. For the last three hundred years the modern world has increasingly closed its eyes and its experience to any sort of participation. The post-Cartesian world thus became ever more inanimate or disenchanted as Max Weber called it. Barfield’s entire philosophy of objective idealism, however, is based on the recognition that participation is and always has been a fundamental aspect of reality, an aspect which, when recognized, has the ability to re-enchant the world. Howard Nemerov, a disciple of Barfield's, expressed this very sentiment in the conclusion to his poem, The Blue Swallows:

All that we have covered so far, though vitally important, has merely been a necessary preamble to the heart of Barfield’s work: the evolution of consciousness. Barfield describes the bulk of Saving the Appearances as, “[an] outline sketch, with one or two parts completed in greater detail, for a history of human consciousness, particularly the consciousness of western humanity during the last three thousand years or so."[46] We have already come across some of the preliminary contours of this sketch: the contraction of meaning and therefore of consciousness throughout history, which we mentioned in our examination of Barfield’s philology; the evolution from wide and vague to narrow and precise, from what was peripherally based to what is centrally based; the movement, for example, from spiritus ripe with meaning to today’s abstraction, spirit. It remains now for us to fill in this picture through an examination of seven epochs: early humanity, the Greco-Roman period, the middle ages, science and the Enlightenment, the romantics, an excursus on Israel, and finally, a premonition of the future which Barfield has called final participation.

It is important that we are clear just what it is to which we are attending. We are not dealing with that interesting enterprise we call the history of ideas, but rather with the history or evolution of consciousness itself. We are not so much concerned with what humans thought in ages past, but rather with how humans in ages past thought. We will, of course, have to mention certain ideas that occurred in each epoch, but we mention them as a means towards the discovery of the consciousness characteristic of that epoch.

Barfield says that there are, in general, two possible causes for people changing their ideas about anything:

One is that the thing has remained the same, but that the people have come to think differently about it. A mistaken theory, for example, may be replaced by a more correct one… The other possible cause of a change of ideas is that the thing itself has changed in the meantime.[47]

He illustrates this through, what he calls, a “very crude example”: In the last century or so, our ideas about the economics of transport and commerce have changed enormously. On the one hand, this is attributable to better statistical and mathematical acumen, techniques of logistics, and other aids that we have developed. However, the main reason for this shift is that transportation itself has changed from an activity of horses and buggies to one of Nissan Pathfinders and Boeing 747s. So too, when we look at ancient ideas regarding consciousness, participation and the world, we must accept the possibility, even the probability, that “ideas have changed because human consciousness itself—the elementary human experience about which the ideas are being formed—the whole relation between man and nature or between conscious man and unconscious man—has itself been in process of change.”[48]

Early humanity emerges from the mists of history as if from a dream. Like a dream, details about the consciousness of this earliest age are lost to us. What we have are shadowy hints in the shape of words and ghosts that wisp through archaic songs and mythologies These shadows hint at a time of perceived gods and goddesses, an immersion in the sublime and an intimacy with the natural world that is foreign today. The outside world was not felt to be distant but was experienced as somehow near, almost as if it were a part of these ancient humans themselves. Indeed, according to Barfield, this earliest epoch was a time of almost undifferentiated union. Even time itself seemed permeable to these ancients who existed in a sort of reverie, time coalescing with eternity in an experience akin to what today’s Australian aborigines might call the Dreamtime.

This is the sort of ‘primitive’ world that Barfield describes as the first stage in the evolution of consciousness. Original participation is not theoretical but experiential. When, in the previous section, we discussed the idea of participation we were only able to recognize its validity after a series of extended arguments. For us, participation is primarily a concept and a difficult one—an abstract, philosophical theory which we reluctantly affirm only after thinking hard and long about thinking itself.[49] Original participation, on the other hand, requires none of these complexities; rather, it is marked by primary experience. According to Barfield, archaic men and women did not need to theorize about a supposed extra-sensory link with phenomena; they knew it viscerally and could feel it, not only in their bones but everywhere around them. As Barfield explains:

The essence of original participation is that there stands behind the phenomena, and on the other side of them from me, a represented which is of the same nature as me. Whether it is called ‘mana,’ or by the names of many gods and demons, or God the Father, or the spirit world, it is of the same nature as the perceiving self, inasmuch as it is not mechanical or accidental, but psychic and voluntary.[50]

This original participation is reflected in the very first glimpses of human language that emerge in this era and what one finds in these glimpses is poetry, everywhere poetry. Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote, “In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry. Every original language near to its source is itself the chaos of a cyclical poem.”[51] As Barfield describes it:

The farther back language as a whole is traced, the more poetical and animated do its sources appear, until it seems at last to dissolve into a kind of mist of myth. The beneficence or malignance—what may be called the soul-qualities—of natural phenomena, such as clouds or plants or animals, make a more vivid impression at this time than their outer shapes and appearances. Words themselves are felt to be alive and to exert a magical influence…[52]

These “soul qualities” can not have been projected by archaic peoples into their world as is frequently suggested in various modern theories about animism. Projection requires that the percipient already has an abstract concept to project, and a sense of a subjective self to do the projection; archaic men and women had neither.[53] Disagreeing with such theories about animism and projection, Barfield cites both anthropological evidence (he is fond of the work of Durkheim and Levy-Bruhl) and etymological evidence as presenting a picture of archaic humanity simply experiencing this mana, these gods and goddesses and soul-qualities, as immediate experiences.[54] Archaic men and women did not project; they felt. The reason language—all language—was at this time poetic was because Nature gave herself poetically to the archaic consciousness. Thinking itself, for these early people, was poetic, “a picture-thinking, a figurative, or imaginative consciousness, which we can only grasp by true analogy with the imagery of our poets, and, to some extent, with our own dreams.”[55] For them, the world wasn’t just pregnant with meaning—it was meaning.

This can be pictured as something like instinct.[56] Barfield suggests that instinct (e.g., the intelligent migration of birds, the homing of salmon or sea turtles, or the sudden outburst of spontaneous behavior by a flock or pack) is caused by participation in the Mind of Nature. Even modern people feel something like instinct well up within themselves during moments of panic or of sexual vigor. In such experiences it is as much something being done to them as something that they are doing. For moderns, the nature that so grabs hold of us feels sterile and impersonal, but every evidence is that for humans living more than three centuries ago, these forces felt alive, even personal. Moreover, it wasn’t just sexual urges and fight-or-flight responses that rose like instinct in early humans; it was the whole of their thought. The further back we plunge into history and pre-history, the more vital, intelligent and immediate this experience of Nature becomes. Barfield imagines that the abundance of meaning in early language forced itself upon the thoughts of archaic humanity the way migratory instinct forces itself upon animals, or the way sexuality still lays hold of the impulses of modern men and women. It makes sense then, that this archaic age was the womb of myths, myths created and given, more or less, by Nature herself.[57]

If ancient words were pregnant with meaning, the old myths were equally or even more so. Trying to convey the fullness and immediacy of these stories, Barfield comments on the myth of Demeter and Persephone:

In the myth of Demeter the ideas of waking and sleeping, of summer and winter, or life and death, of mortality and immortality are all lost in one pervasive meaning. This is why so many theories are brought forward to account for the myths. The naturalist is right when he connects the myth with the phenomena of nature, but wrong if he deduces it solely from these The psychoanalyst is right when he connects the myth with ‘inner’ (as we now call them) experiences, but wrong if he deduces it solely from these. Mythology is the ghost of concrete meaning. Connections between discrete phenomena, connections which are now apprehended as metaphor, were once perceived as immediate realities.[58]

The myth was not invented, it was received. Barfield says, “It was not man who made the myths but the myths, or the archetypal substance they reveal, which made man.”[59] Barfield describes early humanity as an Aeolian harp which stands on the hillside, strings taught, waiting for a rush of wind to sound its strings and call forth its melody. “We shall have to come,” he says, “to think of the archetypal element in myth in terms of the wind that breathed through the harp-strings of individual brains and nerves and fluids, rather as the blood still today pervades and sustains them.”[60]

This picture of archaic humanity may seem overly romantic, but Barfield tempers his portrait of the ancients with a sober caveat: for all the wonder, he reminds us, there is not one single subject, not one actual ‘I’, who can look at the archaic world and revel in its meaning and delight. In the consciousness of the ancients, the world is still somewhat a dream and humanity still, as yet, asleep.

Barfield next turns his attention to the time of Homer in the West and the Vedas in the East. The gods, he notes, are still prevalent. Barfield describes it:

The gods are never far below the surface of Homer’s language—hence its unearthly sublimity. They are the springs of action and stand in place of what we think of as personal qualities. Agamemnon is warned of Zeus in a dream, Telemachus, instead of ‘plucking up courage’, meets the goddess Athene and walks with her into the midst of the hostile suitors, and the whole earth buds into blossom, as Zeus is mingled with Hera on the nuptial couch.[61]

Julian Jaynes describes this same ‘mind of The Iliad’ in his intriguing work, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. He notes that in The Iliad there is a peculiar lack of any mental language (e.g., deliberation) and that nearly all actions are initiated by the gods.[62] “It is one god who makes Achilles promise not to go into battle,” he says, “another who urges him to go, and another who then clothes him in a golden fire reaching up to heaven and screams through his throat across the bloodied trench at the Trojans, rousing in them ungovernable panic. In fact, the gods take the place of [personal] consciousness.”[63]

According to Jaynes (and Barfield), The Iliad cannot be dismissed as simply poetry. Jaynes argues forcibly that The Iliad is history and must be read as such. Both Jaynes and Barfield believe there to be good reason to suppose that the stories and the language of The Iliad are faithful representations of the consciousness of Homer’s time.[64] Accordingly, as far as Achilles knew, Athena really grabbed his golden hair. Jaynes says that we today would say Achilles had an hallucination. So did Hector. So did Agamemnon. “The Trojan War,” says Jaynes, “was directed by hallucinations.”[65]

Where the visions of Jaynes and Barfield diverge is in the use of this word hallucination. If the represented world—that is, the phenomenal or perceived world—is, as Barfield argues, a result of particles and our figuration, then it will not do to imagine the gods as wholly hallucinatory in contrast with the supposedly “real” world. If by the real world one means a world divorced from mind then we are left with mere particles and mathematical abstractions, if even that. In the absence of mind or consciousness, space and time themselves disappear. The evolution of consciousness can not therefore, be something that takes place only inside one's skull as if once humanity hallucinated regularly and now does not. No, says Barfield, ”the actual evolution of the earth we know must have been at the same time an evolution of consciousness.”[66] The phenomenal world of that earlier age was one wherein gods, or the archetypal substance(s) they revealed, were active and present.[67]

The world at the dawn of the Greco-Roman age was then, a mythical world where apparently heavenly beings were perceived side by side with human beings. It was very much a world of original participation, similar in kind to the dreaming consciousness of early humanity. However, only a short time into this ancient world original participation already began to be eclipsed by the rising sun of self-consciousness. Though Plato himself affirmed that all things are “full of gods,”[68] nevertheless the emergence of the classical philosophers (Plato foremost among them) betokened the beginning of the end of original participation.

The Greeks began to discriminate between things that had, heretofore, never been distinguished: truth and myth, prose and poetry, subject and object.[69] On the western coast of Asia Minor in the Ionian town of Miletus, Thales and his successors, Anaximander and Anaximenes, began to inquire into the nature of things. They sought to discover what kind of stuff things were made of. It is not so important for us that Thales concluded that this One out of which the many are made is water, nor that Anaximenes thought instead that the One was composed of air. What is important is that we see in the birth of philosophy a shift in consciousness. In the great minds of Miletus, one no longer encounters the mythological world of original participation. Scientific consciousness and self-consciousness, however slightly, emerged and from Miletus began their spread throughout the Greek world. Across the sea, on the island of Samos, Pythagoras began his exploration of mathematics and, not too much later, Socrates himself began teaching and heckling in the city of Athens. Indeed, throughout the Greek world a revolution was under way. Abstractions found their way not only into thought but into words—and therefore, everyday life—as well. Once full semantic meanings were split up, language began to change its character, to lose its intrinsic life.[70] Consciousness was shifting and developing. In the liebenswelt of the ancient Greeks, consciousness began to contract from the peripheries of the world and into the centers of the human being.

Barfield thus understands the Greco-Roman age as a sort of middle period in the evolution of consciousness. Original participation survived but with its intensity now dimming, while at the same time the self began to develop making detachment and abstraction possible for the first time. Barfield sees this tension reflected in Raphael’s fresco, The School of Athens. There is Plato, of course, robed in red and pointing to the heavens. Just to his left stands his student, Aristotle, cloaked in blue, who points to the earth. “In spite of their proximity in time and space,” says Barfield, “the difference between Plato’s method of thought and the Aristotelian or peripatetic system can hardly be exaggerated.”[71] Plato looked to the heavens, to what we now call the inner world of human consciousness, and spent his intellectual efforts there. Aristotle, on the other hand, “turned to the acquisition of knowledge about the outer world of matter and energy—that is to say, that part of the world which can be apprehended by the five sense and the brain.”[72] With Aristotle and his thought, we find a host of words that indicate a developing sense of inner self and outer world—words like, logic, analytic, ethics, physiology, energy, ethics, moral, substance, principle, universal and subject. For Barfield then, the skyward looking Plato must be seen as closing an epoch, the era dominated by original participation; Aristotle, on the other hand, is opening an era, one that will culminate in the modern west, the developed self and the eradication of original participation.

Those two forces, the movement of original participation and the movement of developing self-consciousness, continued side by side throughout the rise and fall of the Greco-Roman empires. “As far as participation is concerned,” says Barfield, “the difference between medieval and Greek thought is one of degree rather than of kind."[73] Indeed, Barfield suggests that the Greco-Roman era actually lasted right until the advent of modernity with the scientific revolution.[74]

Still, the medieval era had its own flavor and seems closer to us, not only in time but in tenor as well. Barfield senses that in the medieval consciousness, moderns are able to recognize more of themselves than in the Greek mind but, he asserts, this is not yet the modern world. The remnants of original participation lingered still even in the most ordinary of medieval activities. In one of his most luminous passages, Barfield attempts to portray what it would have been like to be a medieval man or woman. Barfield doesn’t describe what they would have thought, but rather what they would have experienced, that which they simply took for granted. It is a brilliant passage and worth quoting at length:

To begin with, we will look at the sky. We do not see it as empty space, for we know very well that a vacuum is something that nature does not allow, any more than she allows bodies to fall upwards. If it is daytime, we see the air filled with light proceeding from a living sun, rather as our own flesh is filled with blood proceeding from a living heart. If it is night-time, we do not merely see a plain homogenous vault pricked with separate points of light, but a regional, qualitative sky, from which first of all the different sections of the great zodiacal belt, and secondly the planets and the moon (each of which is embedded in its own revolving crystal sphere) are raying down their complex influences upon the earth, its metals, its plants, its animals and its men and women, including ourselves. We take it for granted that those invisible spheres are giving forth an inaudible music—spheres, not he individual stars (as Shakespeare’s Lorenzo instructed Jessica, much later, when the representation had already begun to turn into a vague superstition. As to the planets themselves, without being especially interested in astrology, we know very well that growing things are specially beholden to the moon, that gold and silver draw their virtue from sun and moon respectively, copper from Venus, iron from Mars, lead from Saturn. And that our own health and temperament are joined by invisible threads to these heavenly bodies we are looking at. We probably do not spend any time thinking about these extra-sensory links between ourselves and the phenomena. We merely take them for granted

We turn our eyes on the sea—and at once we are aware that we are looking at one of the four elements, of which all things on earth are composed, including our own bodies. We take it for granted that these elements have invisible constituents, for, as to that part of them which is incorporated in our own bodies, we experience them inwardly as the four ‘humours’ which go to make up our temperament. (To-day we still cat the lingering echo of this participation, when Shakespeare makes Mark Antony say of Brutus:

Earth, Water, Air and Fire are part of ourselves, and we of them. And through them also the stars are linked with our inner being, for each constellated Sign of the Zodiac is specially related to one of the four elements, and each element therefore to the three Signs.

A stone falls to the ground—we see it seeking the centre of the earth, moved by something much more like desire than what we to-day call gravity. We prick our finger and a drop of red blood appears. We look as the blood… but for the moment I will not pursue this further.[75]

It may no longer have been Athena pulling Achilles hair, but the medieval world remained a participatory one. The world was near, even intimate, “more like a garment men wore about them than a stage on which they moved.”[76] This intimacy was felt even in the functioning of their sight. Barfield suggests that it is no accident that in the middle ages perspective had yet to be discovered despite the obvious mathematical and technical talent of medieval artists (as evidenced, for example, in a cathedral). Perspective was, for medievals, an unnecessary convention. “To such a world other conventions of visual reproduction, such as the nimbus and the halo were as appropriate as to ours they are not. It was as if the observers were themselves in the picture.”[77] They felt that the world and themselves and the words they used were immersed in something like a clear lake of meaning.[78] If somehow, a medieval man could glimpse the world through our eyes and with our figuration, he would exclaim, “Oh! Look how they stand out!” But, even while awed at our three dimensional, spatial perspective, he would feel the peculiar absence of meaning and connection from the world that confronted him.

None of which is to say that the evolution of human consciousness—the contraction of meaning from the peripheries to a center in the human subject—had slowed during the medieval age at all. As in the era of the Greeks, consciousness continued to develop, to turn inward, to create ever more individualized subjects. One of the great portents of this change, straddling the end of the Greco-Roman era and the beginning of the medieval one, was the person of St. Augustine and especially, his notorious Confessions. While saturated with participation, Augustine’s autobiography, the first ever, displayed an inwardness and self-consciousness that was quite alien to the pre-Augustinian world. It was like a fault line in the world of original participation signaling that more must surely come.

And come it did. Between Aristotle in the 4^th century B.C.E. and his great 13^th century C.E. apologist, Thomas Aquinas, much had changed. As Barfield notes, Aquinas’ intellectus is much more subjective than Aristotle’s correlative nous. In the transition from Aristotelian Greek to its Latin equivalent, there is a sinewy quality that has been lost, a connection with the world that has faded. Indeed, though the men and women of the medieval ages wore the world as a garment, its warmth and intimacy had begun to fade and, with the advent of modernity, the last remnants of medieval participation would fade completely.

Barfield maintains that the modern world is marked most fully by eradication of participation and the birth of the developed self, the contemporary Ego. The contrast between the old world, the medieval era wherein the self was still embryonic, and the new world, the modern era with its mature self, is nicely illustrated by two celebrated works of literature, both of which share the same title: the Confessions. The former age finds its representative in St. Augustine, the latter in Jean Jacques Rousseau. Both works broke new ground in self-expression and inwardness, but it is in their differences that we are most interested. Augustine’s writing, the first autobiography in the West, was centered around his conviction, says J. H. Van den Berg, that “the approach to himself is an aspect of his relation God.” This is, we note, still a form of participation. Van den Berg continues:

[Augustine] wishes to speak of God and not of himself; Rousseau means to speak of the self of the individual, the ‘self’ which is of significance because of itself. Augustine has no knowledge of this self, he does not know the self of this self-satisfied individualism; Rousseau points out, at the very beginning, that he will only concern himself with the description of the individual, himself, ‘moi seul,’ Rousseau.[79]

Rousseau stands as an emblem of a new consciousness. He began his Confessions with the words, “I am going to attempt something that has never been done before and will never be attempted again.”[80] Today these bold words seem hollow. True, a project like Rousseau's Confessions had never been attempted before but, in the wake of Rousseau, attempts would be made again and again with ever increasing subjectivity, inwardness, and self-absorption. As Van den Berg comments, “James Joyce used as much space to describe the internal events of less than a day than Rousseau used to relate the story of half a life.”[81] This is important for if Rousseau’s Confessions remained a solitary novelty in literary history then they would hold little significance for us. Their importance lies largely in the fact that they registered a movement that was then sweeping the modern world–a collective turn inward unprecedented in world history.

The heralds of modernity are too numerous to catalogue—Copernicus, for example, or Galileo, Descartes, or perhaps even someone like Brunelleschi and his perspectival art. In terms of consciousness, modernity was initiated at the time of the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution. In fact, those two movements can be seen as symptoms of the same evolution. [82] As Barfield says, “The Reformation seems, with its insistence on the inwardness of all true grace, to have been but another manifestation of that steady shifting inwards of the centre of gravity of human consciousness which [is observed also] in the scientific outlook.”[83] In the aftermath of the reformation there suddenly appears a host of words hyphenated with self: self-conceit, self-liking, self-love, and others at the end of the sixteenth century; and in the seventeenth, self-confidence, self-command, self-contempt, self-esteem, self-knowledge, and self-pity to name a few.[84]

As for the scientific revolution, Barfield draws attention to Francis Bacon. Bacon was, he says, “the moving spirit of that intellectual revolution which began to sweep over Europe in the sixteenth century.”[85] Whether Bacon caused this great wave or merely rose upon its early crest is impossible to determine. What we can see is that with Francis Bacon, modernity had arrived in force. There was some level of development between the times of Aristotle and Aquinas–the latter evidencing more subjectivity, for example, than the former–but there was still continuity between the two. Aquinas, after all, became the great medieval advocate of Aristotelian thought. Between Aristotle and Aquinas consciousness merely developed. With Francis Bacon however, this development became discontinuous. For Barfield, this discontinuity is illustrated by Bacon’s response to the actus /potentia distinction of classical thought.[86] For centuries this Aristotelian distinction had assured that phenomena were seen as more than mere objects, adding the depth of potentiality to actual, concrete forms. However, as the self developed and the phenomena were increasingly objectified, there remained little room for this sort of depth. Surfaces alone—that was what mattered. Bacon evidenced this when he looked with incoherent disdain at the actus/potentia distinction. To Bacon, this distinction, which “had carried perhaps half the weight of the philosophical mind of all the centuries that had elapsed between Aristotle and Aquinas”—this, for him, is just a ‘frigida distinctio’—mere words, a frigid incomprehensible distinction. [87]

Bacon moreover, was aware of being part of this momentous shift. His writings, for example, make innovative and frequent use of words like progressive, and retrograde. As Barfield notes:

[Looking at the evolution of consciousness from the earliest days of Greece down to the Revival of Learning in England] it must not be forgotten that this process is hitherto an unconscious one. Up to the seventeenth century the outlook of the European mind upon the world, fluid as it has always been, has yet always felt itself to be at rest, just as men have hitherto believed that the earth on which they trod was a solid and motionless body. The first appearance of the distinction between ancient and modern, and of the word progressive, in Bacon’s Essays has already been noted, and we find that progress itself had only begun to emerge a few years before from its relatively parochial meaning of ‘royal journey’.[88]

In Bacon’s century too, the words antiquated, century, decade, epoch, Gothic, out-of-date, primeval, contemporary and primitive first make their debut.

With Bacon, Luther and their contemporaries, the isolated non-participating self had emerged full-grown. The last remnants of original participation were swept away by Descartes and his articulation of the famous mind/body split. For the truly modern, there was the inner world (res cognitas, thought, consciousness) and the outer world (res extensa, matter, extension) and never the twain should meet. A familiar quip sums up the position well: What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.

Barfield assumes such a mind/matter discontinuity to be the standard experience of most of his readers. The solid documents a reader holds, the physical computer on which an author types, the sun blazing outside one's window—these are real and felt as separate from the individual. They confront each of us as alien, different than you and I. Even our bodies are not us, and though we wear them there is a foreigness to these physical natures of ours. Consciousness and meaning, once found everywhere even to the peripheries of the world, have contracted to an imagined space within one's frontal lobe. If there is an I to be found anywhere at all, it is there within one's skull. Many go further, denying that there is an I at all for thoughts regarding one's self and existence are easily explained as so many neurons firing within two pounds of gray matter—at least, this is the view of conventional wisdom. Abandoned to such an imaginary cranial perch, the soul is either destroyed or left utterly alone to look out upon a foreign world. This alienation—call it angst, nausea, disenchantment, horror—this is the predicament of modernity.

Barfield has a name for this mindset—he calls it, simply, idolatry. Francis Bacon became famous for his enumeration of idols of thought, bad mental habits that lead one into error.[89] For Bacon these were things like personal prejudices (idols of the cave) or the constraints of restrictive systems of thought (idols of the theater). Barfield however, looks at Bacon, with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in tow, and sees an even more pernicious form of idolatry. In the wake of Bacon and the scientific revolution the phenomena of the world became, more than at any other point in history, mere objects. The participation of earlier eras had been vanquished from experience and the world was approached impersonally; matter and force were all that was needed to explain the whole of reality. And for these men and women, matter and force weren’t just ways to explain reality—they were reality. In ages past, people held loose to their explanations of the phenomenal world. Their explanations and theories were ways of, as they said, ‘saving the appearances’, hypotheses that made intelligible what they experienced and saw. Barfield illustrates this through an appeal to Copernicus:

The popular view is that Copernicus ‘discovered’ that the earth moves round the sun. Actually the hypothesis that the earth revolves around the sun is at least as old as the third century B.C., when it was advanced by Aristarchus of Samos, and he was neither the only, nor probably the first astronomer to think of it. Copernicus himself knew this. . . The real turning-point in the history of astronomy is something else altogether. It took place when Copernicus. . . began to think, and others, like Kepler and Galileo, began to affirm that the heliocentric hypothesis not only saved the appearances, but was physically true. . . It was not simply a new theory of the nature of the celestial movements. . . but a new theory of the nature of theory; namely, that, if a hypothesis saves all the appearances, it is identical with truth.[90]

Barfield calls this objectifying of both phenomena and our theories (models) about them idolatry. The findings of physics, neurology and philosophy (as discussed above under the heading of ‘Objective Idealism) show that the phenomenal world must include some participation even if ones remain unconscious of it. We previously called this necessary participation figuration. However, in the materialistic universe of the modern mind there is no room for participation at all. Only the phenomena are allowed to exist. There are only forces and matter, nothing more, nothing less. Barfield explains:

A representation, which is collectively mistaken for an ultimate—ought not to be called a representation. It is an idol. Thus the phenomena themselves are idols, when they are imagined as enjoying that independence of human perception which can in fact only pertain to the unrepresented [what we have called, the particles].[91]

We now see why the subtitle of Barfield’s book is A Study in Idolatry. The evolution of consciousness—which until recently has been the evolution of the detached subject, the self, the mature Ego—has come to a head in this state of idolatry. R. J. Reilly summarizes the story for us:

We should read the history of western consciousness, then, as the gradual decline of original participation, the gradual increase of self-consciousness and awareness of the self as distinct from phenomena which has… culminated in idolatry—the granting of objective existence to our collective representations.[92]

To be sure, the accusation of idolatry has a nasty ring to it, but Barfield doesn’t mean to dismiss the evolution of the self as wretched or reprobate. The development of the self is not, as certain deep ecologists and ecofeminists have suggested, a cancer upon the earth. Though critical at times, Barfield never vilifies either science nor rationality. Even our current alienation, while painful, ought not to be dismissed as mere tragedy. Contrary to much post-modern nay-saying, Barfield insists:

The scientific revolution was the great achievement of the human spirit. It was an incalculable advance on anything that had gone before, when scientists finally gave up inferring to spiritual and metaphysical causes and began looking to the phenomena to explain themselves. It brought to us all, not only a new freedom, but a new kind of freedom altogether.[93]

Barfield’s quarrel with the scientific revolution however, is that it has stalled in its growth. “If only they had kept it up!” he exclaims. Alienation ought to be a step in our growth, not a stopping place. Modern, rational, alienated consciousness has failed to develop as it should as evidenced by the current inability to conceive of anything beyond their purely materialistic interpretation of the universe. Such materialism is not science but pure metaphysics. It is one thing to think about the world after a materialistic manner when one's goal is, as with Francis Bacon, to simply manipulate that matter, but this must not be universalized into a materialistic meta-narrative. Says Barfield, “The way in which it is convenient to think about space when you are devising a rocket or a satellite may not be the best or truest way of thinking about it when your concern is with quite other things.”[94] Materialism saves the appearances and can even get a man on the moon, but this does not make it the final truth.

Through the long tumble of evolution, humanity has struggled to reach the modern zenith of self-consciousness, this ability to look out upon one's environment. "Spectators," as Rilke describes us in his 8^th Elegy, "always, everywhere, turned towards the world of objects."[95] Our consciousness, formerly spread asleep throughout the world, has been, through the ages, collected and awakened within our developed selves.

It becomes clear to us that, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, subjectivity is never something that was developed out of nothing at some point in space, but is a form of consciousness that has contracted from the periphery into individual centers. Phylogenetically, it becomes clear, that the task of Homo sapiens, when he first appeared as a physical form on earth, was… to transform the unfree wisdom, which he experienced through his organism as given meaning, into the free subjectivity that is correlative only to active thought, to the individual activity of thinking.[96]

Not just in our heads, this evolution of consciousness has been, as well, an actual historical change in the relation between subject and object. Modern science and thought has rightly reflected this. Barfield comments, “It wasn’t a new idea about the relation between man and nature; it was an idea of the new relation between them.”[97]

Modern idolatry lies in the way we it has universalized this stage. Mistaking a step for a stopping place, modernity assumed the present relationship of subject and object to be absolute, projecting it into imaginative reconstructions of the past and looking forward to its eternal longevity in the future. Barfield believes that it was indeed the task of evolution to bring this evolved self and this modern subject/object relationship into being; but that neither the modern ego nor its relationship to the other is the final destination.

Before continuing any further, we need to consider Barfield's treatment of Israel. In the evolution of Western consciousness Israel stands out as an oddity. Barfield locates this peculiarity in one particular injunction:

You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything in heaven above or on earth beneath or in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them.[98]

This pronouncement runs counter to every tendency we find elsewhere in antiquity. When the second commandment thundered out of Mt. Sinai, everywhere else in the world was saturated in original participation, something that has always been associated with the carving of images and likenesses of things in heaven above, the earth beneath and the waters under the earth.

“Participation and the experience of phenomena as representations go hand in hand,” says Barfield, “and the experience of representations as such is closely linked with the making of images.”[99] Original participation involves, as we said, the awareness that there stands behind the phenomena, and on the other side of them from us, a represented which is of the same nature as us. One of the most natural ways to express this is through the crafting of images. Such images are not mere symbols but are (like the phenomena) participated. Furthermore, in the archaic mind, “artificial representations evoke and focus the experience of nature as representation; the grove is rendered more numinous by the idol in the grove. Thus the ritual avowal of participation was closely associated with the worship of idols…”[100] Phallic symbols especially, appear in cultures of original participation. Barfield explains,

To be intensely aware of participation is for man, to feel the centre of energy in himself identified with the energy of which external nature is the image. Thus, in the religious aspect, original participation has always tended to express itself in cults of a phallic nature. The proper role played by the phallic emblem, as image of man’s participation in a nature apprehended… to be female, is easily conceived.[101]

Barfield adds that the degeneration of these cults into orgiastic rites is also easy.

When Moses delivered the second commandment it was an injunction that struck forcefully at the heart of original participation, which is to say, it struck forcefully at the very heart of the ancient world. Barfield captures the strangeness of it all when he comments on the second commandment, “This is perhaps the unlikeliest thing that ever happened.”[102]

In Israel, the prohibition against idols and their worship unleashed a moral force which worked towards the destruction of participation. The history of Israel records her difficulties and (less often) successes in following the 2^nd commandment. At end though, the second commandment did seem to succeed in the destruction of original participation. Barfield looks at Israel’s psalmody and notes their flavor. While lines like, Clothed in majesty and splendor, wearing the light as a robe! You stretch out the heavens like a tent,[103] sound similar to the participating consciousness encountered in other cultures, closer scrutiny reveals that the world of the Psalmist is quite different from the world of original participation. It is a world in the aftermath of the eradication of participation. Barfield suggests that the closest literary parallels to the Psalms are not found in the literature of early participating cultures, but in the poetry of the last few centuries—“Traherne perhaps, or even Walt Whitman. For here is not only no hint of mythology, but no real suggestion of manifestation. Everything proclaims the glory of God, but nothing represents Him.”[104]

What we have in Israel then, is an impulse similar to and yet distinct from the rational Greek impulse that culminated in the modern non-participating consciousness. The difference is that in Israel this impulse was “not so much from any want of mental alertness as from a positive objection to participation as such.”[105] The Greco-Roman world ended participation and developed the Ego through the agency of rational thought (which itself developed naturally through the centuries). For the Jew, according to Barfield, the end of participation came instead through a moral injunction, the divine commandment. Barfield illustrates this point effectively.

If the children of Israel were enjoined not to worship ‘the sun or the moon or any other star’, it was because they were tempted by the glory of these appearances to do that very thing. They refrained because they were commanded to refrain, not because they had been educated to see the greater light and the less as a ball of gas and a ball of rock, which just happened to be there.[106]

This moral injunction is interesting in itself as an historical novelty, but Barfield sees an even greater significance in this event. He considers the divine name, YHWH. Barfield examines the history of this name and sees in that history the Jewish movement away from original participation. He points to two well known stories. The first is Moses’s meeting with God in Exodus 3. For Moses, the Angel of the Lord appears (as the Lord is wont to appear to those functioning in original participation) in the midst of a burning bush. Now, look further to 1Kings 19, where instead of Moses and the burning bush we find Elijah on the mountain. Barfield notes, “by the time of Elijah the withdrawal of Israel from participation was already far advanced, and we are given, instead [of the burning bush], in the well-known verses, a crescendo of appearances, in each of which God was not.”[107]

A mighty hurricane split the mountain and shattered the rocks before YHWH. But YHWH was not in the hurricane. And after the hurricane, an earthquake. But YHWH was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake, fire. But YHWH was not in the fire. And after the fire, a still small voice…[108]

Seeing this pattern, from burning bush to still small voice, Barfield notes that the Hebrew withdrawal from original participation is of a very different tenor than the suppression of participation accomplished through rational thought in the West. In Israel, participation wasn’t just destroyed; it was truly ingathered. “Indeed, it might with equal truth be described as a concentration or centripetal deepening of participation.”[109] This remarkable observation is only strengthened through a closer examination of the divine name itself.

The divine name, the Tetragrammaton, YHWH, was derived from the Hebrew verb ‘to be’ which also carried the sense of ‘to breathe’. Barfield points out that the Hebrew word for ‘Jew’ was similarly rendered YHWDI: “the texture of the language hints that a devout Jew could hardly name his race without tending to utter the Tetragrammaton.”[110] Barfield describes how any true child of Israel gazing at the divine name must have felt it rise from within him, whispering up from the depths of his being. Elijah’s still small voice is a case in point. The divine name, and with it participation, had become interiorized. God was no longer in rocks and fires and gale force winds.

He had now only one Name—I AM—and that was participated by every being who had eyes that saw and ears that heard and who spoke through his throat. But it was incommunicable, because its participation by the particular self which is at this moment uttering it was an inseparable part of its meaning. Everyone can call his idol ‘God’, and many do; but no being who speaks through his throat can call a wholly other and outer Being ‘I’.[111]

The divine name is, as Rabbi Maimonides wrote in the late twelfth century, “that name in which there is no participation between the Creator and any thing else.”[112]

Having surveyed the course of evolution—a course that led from the dream-like world of archaic humanity through to the alienated and idolatrous experience of modernity—one is left with the crucial questions: What next? Where to from here?

For Barfield, there can be no question of going back to original participation. Were it even possible, to do so would be a disaster of cosmic proportions for it would be the undoing of what Nature has labored so long to bring forth, namely, the self. However, neither can we be content with modern idolatry and the suppression of participation. Looking for a way forward, Barfield turns his face towards the world of aesthetics.

The internalization of things—the whole movement of which culminated in the birth of the differentiated self—not only freed humanity scientifically and technologically, but gave rise to other abilities as well. In particular, once the subject stood opposite its objects, the faculty of memory became first possible and then powerful.

As soon as unconscious or subconscious organic processes have been sufficiently polarized to give rise to phenomena on the one side and consciousness on the other, memory is made possible. As consciousness develops into self-consciousness the remembered phenomena become detached or liberated from their originals and so, as images, are in some measure at man’s disposal. The more thoroughly participation has been eliminated, the more [the images] are at the disposal of his imagination to employ as it chooses.[113]

If this is indeed the case then when one looks, for example, at the history of art, one should expect to see this increasing liberation of the imagination demonstrated; that is to say, an ever more liberated self ought to correspond with an ever greater capacity for creative expression. One ought to be able to trace a historical parallelism between the development of the detached self, on the one hand, and an increase in creative freedom, on the other. And indeed, this is exactly what the history of art reveals.

Roughly parallel to the evolution of the Ego, creativity has grown throughout history. This is not to say that art has progressively gotten better—as anyone with a modicum of aesthetic sense can testify—but that the creative capacity itself has grown. In earlier ages we find that art is almost exclusively mimetic: artists were primarily concerned with the reproduction of nature. Barfield considers this a fitting enterprise for these earlier stages of consciousness.

As long as nature herself continued to be apprehended as image, it sufficed for the artist to imitate Nature. Inevitably, the life or spirit in the object lived on in his imitation, if it was a faithful one. For at the same time it could not help being more than an imitation, inasmuch as the artist himself participated the being of the object. [114]

Evolution however, did not allow good art to remain mimetic. As history progressed and the phenomena became less and less participated, certain thinkers—Dio Chrysostom, Plotinus, Scaliger, Sydney—began to speak of the imagination as something qualitatively more than just mimicry, something which could be called genuinely creative. This was a radical development, a shift in the balance of power, as it were, from the world to the artist. No longer subservient to the appearances, the artist became, in a very real sense, a creator. As Scaliger says of the poet, “[he] maketh a new nature and so maketh himself as it were a new God.”[115]

After the scientific revolution mimetic art vanished almost overnight and in its place this creative faculty (artist as creator) emerged at last, full-bodied and mature :

The imitation of an idol is a purely technical process; which (as was quickly discovered) is better done by photography. To-day an artist cannot rely on the life inherent in the object he imitates, any more than a poet can rely on the life inherent in the words he uses. He has to draw the life forth from within himself.[116]

We said that this increasing capacity for creativity does not necessarily translate into ‘better art’ and, looking at the contemporary scene, this becomes rather painfully clear. For too many today, the notion that the artist must draw life from himself has degenerated into that bastardized notion that art exists solely to allow the artist to ‘express his personality’. Barfield will have none of this and sees it not only as tedious and dismal but dangerous as well. Such creative expression is destructive inasmuch as it is based on and, in turn, reinforces the belief that the phenomena really are simply objects, pure surfaces, hollow things—in other words, idols. Such an artist has forgotten that there ever was any meaning in the world and certainly doesn’t realize that the meaning once felt throughout the cosmos sits now collected in the human center.

To redeem creativity from such idolatry Barfield appeals to the romantics. It is important to remember that Coleridge, Wordsworth, and their romantic colleagues all lived in an age in which original participation had been almost entirely eradicated. Theirs was a world of idols. In this environment then, to look out, as Goethe and Wordsworth did, upon the world and to feel life, vitality, spirit and meaning therein was nothing short of iconoclastic. The idols were being smashed, turned once more into representations. Wordsworth, like many of his contemporaries, often misinterpreted this experience, developing a sort of pantheism that was really a hankering after original participation. This mistake plagued the romantics and all but aborted the movement, for there is no going back to original participation. There were a few romantics however, who avoided this retrogressive error, Coleridge first among them.

One year after publishing the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge, having been supplied with funds, traveled to Göttingen. It was there that he encountered and became immersed in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, “something which,” as Bertrand Russell says, “did not improve his verse.”[117] Perhaps not his verse, but Barfield contends that this Kantian perspective immunized Coleridge’s thought against the romantic error of pantheism and retro-participation (the desire to go back to original participation… regression). Coleridge’s philosophy taught him that “if nature is to be experienced as representation, she will be experienced as representation of—Man.” [118] The Goddess Natura is no longer found on the other side of appearances. We find her instead, within ourselves. As Barfield says, “Pan has shut up shop. But he has not retired. He has merely gone indoors.”[119]

Humanity now stands in what Barfield calls a directionally creator relationship to nature.[120] Wordsworth says that nature is, “the mighty world of eye and ear—both what they half create, and what perceive.”[121] Or as Coleridge puts it,

This recognition of humanity’s complicity in the life of nature infuses the artist with a new dignity and responsibility. Throughout the evolution of consciousness, meaning has contracted into the human center from whence it now radiates, like light through a prism, to the wider world. Such is our dignity. “The world, like Dionysius, is torn to pieces by pure intellect;” says Barfield, “but the Poet is Zeus; he has swallowed the heart of the world; and he can reproduce it in a living body.”[123] Our responsibility lies in the calling to create (not just to mimic) after the manner in which Nature herself creates. This is what it means to ‘swallow the heart of the world’ and it is the true vocation of both the artist and, further, all humanity.

Humanity stands as a priest, a representative—a representation—of that meaning which evolution has collected in us and which is given back to the world through the right expression of our creative faculties. For this to be more than banal self-expression, it is necessary to recognize that “in the course of the earth’s history, something like a Divine Word has been gradually clothing itself with the humanity it first gradually created—so that what was first spoken by God may eventually be respoken by man.”[124] Such a speaking and echoing of the Word is, in fact, is the entire story of evolution, as Barfield describes it. His vision, as we have seen, moves from a world encased in unconscious meaning to a world of idols stripped of the meaning, which had been, instead, collected into a center within Homo sapiens. It is from these personal, human centers that conscious meaning presently spreads itself back out to a world we half-create, half-perceive—the Divine Word now respoken by Adam.

To the extent that romanticism is mature, that is to say, to the extent that it leads to such a reiteration of the Divine Word by humanity, to that extent it is a harbinger of a new epoch: final participation.[125] Final participation is human-centered participation.[126] What makes it human-centered is that it arises willfully out of subjects who recognize fully their own subjectivity and freedom. We can express it in the language of ontogeny.[127] For archaic humanity, original participation was a given because the self was still embryonic. Only through the process first, of emergence from the womb of Nature and, then, through the process of differentiation from that primordial mother (the gradual denial of participation), could the self come into its own. “[Final Participation] differs from original participation inasmuch as it is achieved and not given,” says Barfield. “It depends on the wills and choices of individual human beings…”[128] Final participation then, is the conscious (and therefore, free) re-avowal of participation by the developed self.[129]

To the degree that one, buffeted perhaps by Barfield’s earlier arguments, gives intellectual consent to the reality of participation, one can be said to have entered into final participation, at least partially. Barfield insists however, that there is still more than this. Final participation, like original before it, must become a matter of experience.

[Final] participation as an actual experience is only to be won to-day by special exertion… it is a matter, not of theorizing, but of imagination in the genial or creative sense. A systematic approach to-wards final participation may therefore be expected to be an attempt to use imagination systematically.[130]

The imagination, which is more than just fancy, will enhance figuration and thereby reveal hitherto unapprehended parts of the whole.[131] Barfield sees Coleridge and certain modern physicists anticipating final participation intellectually but not experientially. Goethe, on the other hand, began to systematically experience final participation in his experiments with plants. Steiner too, in Barfield’s mind, stands as an example of lived final participation. Perhaps the flaws in both Goethe and Steiner can be forgiven, to some extent, when one realizes that both were in fact, forerunners and pioneers in this emerging and (mostly) uncharted experience.

We can imagine the course of evolution not as a simple line then, but rather as something like a “U”, a descent followed by an ascent (see fig. 2). Evolution, Barfield says, “[is] not simply an ascent of the material towards ever greater complexity of organization; it [is] also a descent, an involution of the Spirit into the Material[132], which it, the Spirit, organizes and transforms, and through which it acquires a new intensity, a new level of self-awareness.”[133] Self-awareness and not the skin of my body is the threshold between inner and outer, manifest and unmanifest, noumena and phenomena. Presently, we sit almost at the nadir of this evolutionary process, fully developed selves existing in a world of idols.

After so long a journey, evolution has finally become conscious of itself in the human being, but this achievement has not come cheaply; it has cost us our union with the world. Barfield looks forward to a new movement, however. As humanity ascends the right-hand limb of the “U”—under influences like the romantic movement or theoretical physics—humanity ascends (but now as free, individual selves) towards greater participation. In fact, during the ascent of this right limb one can expect to pass through, in reverse order, the participation of ages past. Importantly, this is not regression for one does not return to a pre-personal, original participation. Instead, liberated selves will their free participation in the cosmic drama.

The evolution of the self has been the evolution of true freedom, which Barfield recognizes is a dangerous thing. Until the self came to term, evolution proceeded without much concern for human choice. However, having given birth to the Ego and become conscious of the grand empyreal project that brought us to this place, evolution concedes to humanity a choice. Evolution, broadly speaking, will continue. Human participation, the lack or presence of it, will affect the phenomenal world. Our choice is whether that effect will be positive or negative. Barfield describes the dangers:

The simply fact is, that all the unity and coherence of nature depends on participation of one kind or the other. If therefore man succeeds in eliminating all original participation, without substituting any other, he will have done nothing less than to eliminate all meaning and all coherence from the cosmos.[134]

Furthermore, should we choose to participate, the type of participation becomes vitally important. In final participation, our wills are active in shading figuration through the use of the imagination. “Imagination is not, as some poets have thought, simply synonymous with good.”[135] The questions that lies before us is the question that lies before the artist as well. What tenor of imagination will we bring forth? Will we swallow the heart of the world and create after the manner of the Divine Word? Or, will we give expression to egocentric visions, perverse and destitute? “We should remember this when we see a picture of a dog with six legs emerging from a vegetable marrow or a woman with a motorcycle substituted for her left breast.”[136]

Reality will be constructed. This in itself is nothing new—our entire exploration of the evolution of consciousness has been an exploration of various realties (the magical world of archaic humanity, the mythic world of the Greco-Romans, the rational world of modernity) so constructed throughout history. What is new however, is the extent to which we are now responsible for this process. What was previously automatic is now contingent—that is to say, evolution is no longer primarily an unconscious process, but a conscious one. We have, so to speak, put our hands to the till. Where we go now is up to us.

This is not merely some post-modern insistence on the social construction of reality. Barfield’s work differs significantly from post-modernism in that he thoroughly rejects unchecked relativism. The social construction of reality is only half of the story—the subjective pole of a larger whole that transcends subject and object. What this means is that two conflicting worldviews, for instance, might be equally true without necessarily being equally right. The ethical validity of a worldview lies in its success or failure in imaginatively continuing the pattern of creation. National Socialism is patently inferior to Gandhi’s satyagraha. The latter, having swallowed the heart of the world, creates after the manner of the Divine Word, whereas the former brings only destruction and the perversion of the pattern of creation.

If we reproduce after the manner of the Divine Word, it will mean a rebirth for the cosmos. This is, as St. Paul said, a revelation for which all of creation eagerly awaits, groaning as if in labor.[137] The title of Barfield’s book ultimately has this rebirth in view. Final participation, rightly embraced, will save the appearances from their present futility. Barfield describes the conditions necessary:

The appearances will be `saved' only if, as men approach nearer and nearer to conscious figuration and realize that it is something which may be affected by their choices, the final participation which is thus being thrust upon them is exercised with the profoundest sense of responsibility, with the deepest thankfulness and piety towards the world as it was originally given to them in original participation, and with a full understanding of the momentous process of history, as it brings about the emergence of the one from the other.[138]

To swallow the heart of the world and to reproduce it in final participation will take effort and love but will be well worth it. It will mean a new flowering of the cosmos, a rebirth of nature. As Barfield says, “The world of final participation will one day sparkle in the light of the eye as it never yet sparkled early one morning in the original light of the sun. But the coming of this light presupposes a goodness of heart and a steady furnace in the will.”[139]

Lurking not far beneath the surface of most all of Barfield's writings lies the powerful cosmic and divine figure of the Christ. Although some of Barfield's works never mention him by name (History, Guilt and Habit, and Speaker's Meaning) and two of his works (Poetic Diction and History in English Words) were written prior to Barfield's conversion, nevertheless, it is not saying too much to name Christ the animating force and major character in nearly all of Barfield's thought. Though his thought transcends parochial confinements, it must be admitted that Barfield was, implicitly in the beginning and explicitly at the end, through and through a thoroughly Christian thinker.

However, while even a cursory examination of his works reveals the centrality of Christ in Barfield's thought, understanding the function of Christ in his system is quite another matter. It seems best to approach the issue on two fronts: first to look at Barfield's appreciation for the cosmic or philosophical role of Christ and secondly, to attend to the matter of the historical Christ.

Of all the messianic metaphors in Scripture, Barfield was fondest of the great Logos image found in the opening chapter of John's gospel. Given Barfield's insatiable interest in philology and poetry, it should come as no surprise that even as a youngster Barfield found the philosophical concept of a divine Word, the eternal Logos, eminently attractive.

Before Barfield ever became a Christian, he was already intrigued by the philosophical concept of the Logos. It is hardly surprising then, to find that Barfield's understanding of the Logos reaches back into the centuries before the Christian revelation. In his early book, History in English Words, Barfield describes the rise of Greek thought, paying special attention to Plato, as accomplishing something parallel to the mystery cults of the ancient world. "As in the Mysteries," says Barfield, "so at the heart of early Greek philosophy lay two fundamental assumptions. One was that an inner meaning lay hid behind external phenomena… The other assumption concerned the attainment by man of immortality."[140] These two assumptions, he notes, were complementary and as present in the cult of, say, Isis and Osiris as in Platonic philosophy.

The Logos comes to the fore with the advent Stoic philosophy. These thinkers, very much in the wake of Platonic thought, continued to wrestle with the metaphysical relationship between spirit and matter. The Greek word 'logos' received from them the weight of this burden. Barfield explains:

'Logos' in Greek had always meant both 'word' (an expressed meaning) and the creative faculty in human beings–'Reason', as it is often translated–which expresses itself by making and using words. The Stoics were the first to identify this human faculty with that divine Mind (Nous) which earlier Greek philosophers had perceived as pervading the visible universe.[141]

All of this is tied to the evolution of consciousness. Though present nascently in earlier Greek thought, the concept of the Logos could only emerge with the Stoics (who also first articulated the problem of "subjective" and "objective" reality) precisely because they historically were among the first to feel themselves detached from this indwelling creative principle.[142] The concept met with quick popularity throughout the ancient world. So popular was the concept that it found its way into the thought of the Jewish Platonist Philo who, adding what the young Barfield calls "a certain Semitic awfulness" to it, actually referred to this Logos as the 'only begotten son'.[143]

From there, it only required a few lines from St. John to connect Logos with Messiah, the mysterious Word with Jesus the Christ. Barfield notes, as did not a few church fathers, that ideas began to circulate about Christianity as the visible incarnation of the wonder that lay at the heart of so many mystery religions and Egyptian cults.

A real Horus had been born of a virgin, and had risen again as an Osiris… What had so often been enacted dramatically within the sacred precincts had now taken place in a peculiar way on the great stage of the world, this time not for a few, but for all to see. A God had himself died in order to rise again to eternal life… at last the Mysteries had been revealed… In the Christ the Logos of Philo and his school had become incarnate in human form, the Word had been made flesh.[144]

This is essential background if one is to understand Barfield's many references to Christ and the Divine Word in other contexts. This is a philosophical Christ, a cosmic Christ, part of salvation history, yes, but also the key to the very structure of the world: through him all things were made. Christ is not confined to the sanctuary or the heavenly realms; for Barfield, the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, the Logos, is or is potentially, one with nature[145]–a thought we might call, in Teilhard's language, pan-Christism. It is positivism not Christianity that teaches us to consider the world of creation independently of the Divine Word. And such deism, as William Blake foretold time and again, is simply a halfway house to atheism. Instead, Barfield says, we must hold in our minds a vision of the world that sees Christ the Logos as both the ground and the transforming agent of creation and evolution.[146]

Those unfamiliar with such language might become uncomfortable at this point for they see the specter of pantheism lying behind such talk. Coleridge, Barfield's great mentor on this subject, suffered himself through such accusations time and again. However, a closer examination of either Coleridge or Barfield reveals that accusations of pantheism are without warrant. From Coleridge, Barfield inherited a sophisticated Trinitarian theology. It was also Coleridge who first taught Barfield the concept of polarity. Indeed, for both of these thinkers it is impossible to consider either polarity or tri-unity, one apart from the other. “Another name for the principle of polarity,” says Barfield, “is tri-unity; the two poles, with their originating unity as the relation between them.”[147] Barfield's pan-Christism is a Trinitarian pan-Christism. Barfield does not say that God qua God is potentially one with nature. Rather, the Christic pole of the divine unity, the Second Person of the Trinity, fulfills that role.[148]

Wolfhart Pannenberg says that Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, is the archetype of distinction from the Father. This is Pannenberg's answer to the difficult question, How can there be anything except God? His answer is Trinitarian—because from all eternity there exists within God a Logos who is not identical with the Father, therefore distinction on all levels (cosmic, biotic, human, etc.) becomes possible.[149] There is something of the same thought in Barfield’s work (again, following Coleridge). He writes:

The origin of species cannot fruitfully be considered apart from the origin of all “distinctities” in the proceeding Word. Nor this in turn except in connection with the formula of creation pronounced in the opening of St. John’s gospel: that the Word was in the beginning, that the Word was “with” God and that the Word was God.[150]

All of creation finds its being in this Divine Word, setting up a polarity between the Father and Christ, and Christ and creation. This is why the Stoics connected the human principle of creativity or Reason (the early logos) with the divine mind, the Nous. All things are connected through these participatory and polar relationships allowing Barfield to provocatively assert that humanity's identity is in but not co-extensive with God. Christ, for Barfield, is the divine field, the super-individual consciousness from which all individual consciousness emerged.[151]

This talk of emergence suggests also the field of history, the other lens through which we must view Barfield's Christ. Christ is the great source of all consciousness–light and life, as St. John said–and is furthermore the arena upon which evolution occurs. Evolution necessarily involves the concept of time (and with it, history). For Barfield, this the great Christian revelation. Other faiths have perceived tri-unity in the Godhead or polarity in the world.

What is peculiar to Christianity is the nexus… between Second Person of the Trinity and a certain historical event in time. For the Christian, accordingly, religion can never be simply the direct relationship between his individual soul and the eternal Trinity.[152]

Religion then, is always historically mediated; it is salvation history not simple Gnosticism; it is evolution.

In Barfield's vision, evolution as an historical process is the changing relationship between God and humanity. We recall that “The phenomenal world arises from the relation between a conscious and an unconscious [both of which originate from the Word]. Evolution," says Barfield, "is the story of the changes that relation has undergone and is undergoing.”[153] He can hardly believe that this viewpoint remains so neglected.

When we look back on past periods of history, we are often confronted with inconsistencies and blind spots in human thinking, which to us are so palpable that we are almost astonished out of belief… I believe that the blind-spot which posterity will find most startling in the last hundred years or so of Western civilization, is, that it had, on the one hand, a religion which differed from all others in its acceptance of time, and of a particular point in time, as a cardinal element in its faith; that it had, on the other hand, a picture in its mind of the history of the earth and man as an evolutionary process; and that it neither saw nor supposed any connection whatever between the two.[154]

The changing, evolving relationship between God and creation is their very meaning of history itself. For, as Barfield asks, “Has history any real significance unless in the course of it the relation between the Creator and the creature is being changed?”[155]

The key event in this change of relationship is the incarnation of the Logos, but we have only just begun to understand this event. What, Barfield asks, does it mean? What was it all about?

If we accept at all the claims made by Christ Jesus concerning his own mission, we must accept that he came to make possible in the course of time the transition of all men from original to final participation.[156]

That is, Christ came to make possible a shifting in the Divine-Human polarity, a change of relationship. As we move ever more fully into final participation we perceive this relationship in deeper and more majestic hues. We come to see then, that “the primary end [of evolution] is a growing perception of the God-man polarity, a deeper and deeper penetration into the mystery of the Incarnation.”[157]

Barfield says that the historical Jesus called this movement towards ultimate manifestation, "the kingdom". It is this that Christ came to make possible. “Final participation is indeed the mystery of the kingdom—of the kingdom that is to come on earth, as it is in heaven—and we are still only on the verge of its outer threshold.”[158] The greater part of final participation still lies in the future. The kingdom, though already present to some extent, remains mostly a 'not yet'. We are “hardly past” the incarnation, as Barfield says, “we hardly know as yet what the Incarnation means; for what is two thousand years in comparison with the ages which preceded it?”[159]

But, so long as we turn our attention towards Christ and accept our dignity and responsibility with gravity, we will know. The transition to final participation “will not be taken with ease; but in the end, if the Christ infuses my whole man, mind as well as heart, the cosmos of wisdom, with all its forgotten truths, will dwell in me…”[160]

Before we round out our discussion of Barfield and Christianity, a final note is in order. Barfield didn't start as a Christian, but as a philosopher and a philologist. This is easy enough to see in his early works and in his concern with the Logos over the historical Jesus. What is fascinating however, is why and how Barfield converted.

When he was studying etymology Barfield came to some significant conclusions. The further back in history one goes, the more one sees words expressing “inner” values in terms of the outer world. We discussed this phenomenon earlier in this chapter—how for instance, a word like spiritus (spirit) was originally intimately connected with breath and wind. Progressing through history, the original fullness of words diminished until spirit came to mean simply something interior (e.g., the principle of life). History has seen a reversal in the use of language from the habit of referring to ourselves, our thoughts, and our expressions in terms of the “outside” world to the recent tendency of referencing qualities in the outside world exclusively in terms of their effect upon ourselves, that is, subjectively.[161] Looking at this historical movement, Barfield understood that “[one[ can’t fail to be struck by the fact that there has occurred in the course of ages a change of emphasis. One could really say a change in the center of gravity…”[162] Barfield went further still. Examining the etymological evidence, he came to the conclusion that it is possible to “say with confidence that the great change of direction took place between, well, let’s say between the death of Alexander the Great and the birth of St. Augustine. Indeed, there are indication which would tempt [one] to be much more precise.”[163]

Barfield, continued his study noting when the concepts subjective and objective developed, and taking interest in the resulting awareness of duality not only between mind and the senses, but between the self and its environment. All of this he says, would compel and honest investigator—even one who had never heard of the Gospels or of St. Paul—to conclude “that a crucial moment in the evolution of humanity must have occurred certainly during the seven or eight centuries on either side of the reign of Augustus and probably somewhere near the middle of that period.”[164] Barfield describes the surprise, the sheer delight that such an investigator would feel discovering that:

…at about the middle of the period which his investigation had marked off, a man was born who claimed to be the son of God, and to have come down from Heaven, that he spoke to his followers of “the Father in me and I in you,” that he told all those who stood around him that “the kingdom of God is within you,” and startled them, and strove to reverse the direction of their thought-for the word “metanoia,” which is translated “repentance,” also means a reversal of the direction of the mind—he startled them and strove to reverse the direction of their thought by assuring them that “it is not that which cometh into a man which defileth him, but that which goeth out of him.”[165]

Barfield describes himself as that investigator. Raised to believe that the Gospels were superstition and bunk he came, through his study of philology, to believe in Christ, “because he felt in the utmost humility, that if he had never heard of it thorough the Scriptures, he would have been obliged to try his best to invent something like it as a hypothesis to save the appearances.”[166]

The Christ we discover in Barfield’s work therefore, is this Christ: the fulcrum of the evolutionary movement, the divine Logos incarnated at just the right time. Indeed, for Barfield, time is all important. He disagrees as strongly as possible with a view that sees the incarnation, in Charles Williams’ words, as “the flash and the prolongation.”[167] Rather, it must be seen in its full historical force, which is to say, a force that enters the process of history. Christ is the energia of which St. Paul speaks.[168] He is not only the fulcrum, but the animator of evolution. Christ is, in fact, "the cosmic wisdom on its way from original to final participation."[169]

[1] PD, 75.

[2] SA, 72.

[3] Quoted by David Lavery on The Owen Barfield World Wide Web Site. (www.owenbarfield.com/friends)

[4] Reilly, “A Note on Barfield, Romanticism, and Time.” Studies in Polarity. Ed. Shirley Sugerman (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1976), 183.

[5] Adey, C.S. Lewis’ Great War With Owen Barfield. (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 1978), 122.

[6] OBCSL, 107; Cf. also, RM, 3.

[7] Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 90.

[8] WA, 39.

[9] PD, 182.

[10] WA, 50.

[11] HEW, 174; HGH, 35.

[12] Barfield, “The Nature of Meaning.” Seven 2:37 (1981).

[13] Tennyson, G. B. “Etymology and Meaning.” Studies in Polarity. Ed. Shirley Sugerman (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1976), 177.

[14] PD, 80.

[15] PD, 80-81.

[16] Ibid., 81.

[17] PD, 75.

[18] HEW, 18.

[19] SM, 110.

[20] Tennyson, G. B. “The Forgetive Mind.” A Barfield Reader: Selections from the Writings of Owen Barfield. Ed. G. B. Tennyson. (Wesleyan University Press: Hanover, NH, 1999), xxv.

[21] PD, 14.

[22] WA, 10.

[23] Ibid., 11.

[24] SA, 12.

[25] Ibid.

[26] HGH, 14-15.

[27] SA, 15.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid. Italics added.

[30] Blake, The Portable Blake. Ed. Alfred Kazin (New York: Viking Press, 1946), 147.

[31] SA, 22-23.

[32] Sugerman, Shirley. “A Conversation With Owen Barfield.” Evolution of Consciousness: Studies in Polarity. Ed. Shirley Sugerman (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1976), 18. Italics added.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Barfield, of course, as he everywhere admits, learned the subject from Samuel Taylor Coleridge and deals with it quite extensively in What Coleridge Thought. Cf., WCT, 26-58;179-193.

[35] SM, 38.

[36] WCT, 36.

[37] SM, 39.

[38] WCT, 36. The imagination, for Coleridge and Barfield, is distinguished from fancy. Imagination is the intuitive perception/creation of forms which themselves become/are part of Nature. Fancy, on the other hand, is more akin to what we today treat as imagination—simple daydreams, for example, or fictions. The reason that polarity is the basic act of imagination is that, following Coleridge, Barfield believes that “unlike the logical principles of identity and contradiction, [polarity] is not only a form of thought, but also the form of life.” (Cf. SM, 39) That is to say, Reality (or Nature) is polar.

[39] SA, 24.

[40] While, it is worth noting that Coleridge, Barfield’s great tutor, so admired the Oxford bishop that he named his son Berkeley, it also needs to be said that Barfield is not simply a Berkleyan.

[41] “Nature unperceived,” says Barfield, “is the unconscious…” That is, the phenomenal world of human beings is the collective consciousness of human beings. Cf., RCA, 211.

[42] SA, 135.

[43] Ibid., 134.

[44] SA, 40.

[45] Nemerov, The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 398. These are the last lines of Nemerov’s poem, “The Blue Swallows.” The relationship between Nemerov and Barfield has been helpfully explored by Donna Potts in Howard Nemerov and Objective Idealism: The Influence of Owen Barfield.

[46] SA, 13.

[47] SM, 70.

[48] Ibid., 71.

[49] Barfield distinguishes between three types of thought: Firstly, there is the figuration with which we are already familiar. Secondly, there is alpha-thinking which is thinking about something. Figuration allows us to perceive that there is a tree. Alpha-thinking allows us to think about the tree, for example, whether its buds will bloom or how its leaves manage to photosynthesize. Thirdly, there is beta-thinking which is thinking about thinking or what Teilhard called reflection. Cf. SA, 24-25.

[50] SA, 42.

[51] Quoted in PD, 58.

[52] BR, 77.

[53] PD, 203-205. In fact, if anyone around here is projecting it is we moderns projecting our contemporary experience of consciousness and the phenomenal world onto our distant forebears.

[54] SA, 32.

[55] PD, 207.

[56] SA, 32.

[57] This is the same insight that Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist, was aiming at with his frequent quip that myth is more biology than biography.

[58] PD, 91-92.

[59] RM, 75.

[60] Ibid. R. J. Reilly summarizes Barfield’s position, “Language and myth arose in a pre-historic time, more precisely, in a pre-human time. Neither language nor myth has its origin in individual human intention but in Nature herself.” Cf. Reilly, Romantic Religion, (Athens, GA: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1976), 92.

[61] PD, 93.

[62] Jaynes, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976), 78.

[63] Ibid., 72.

[64] I am not making any judgment on whether or not there was a Homer. It hardly matters whether there was one author or many, for the point is not to highlight the author’s genius but the shared experience of consciousness of his or her time.

[65] Jaynes, 75.

[66] SA, 65. We will attend to this subject more fully below.

[67] I admit that this is a hard pill to swallow, but Barfield insists that we must arrive at just such a position if we are going to follow our logic to the end. For those struggling at this point, I can only refer you back to the earlier section on methodology, especially the discussions on integral thought and objective idealism.

[68] Quoted in Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind. (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991), p. 12.

[69] PD, 94.

[70] Ibid.

[71] HEW, 108.

[72] Ibid.

[73] SA, 99.

[74] SA, 96ff.

[75] SA, 76-77.

[76] SA, 94.

[77] Ibid., 94-95. Italics added.

[78] Ibid.

[79] Van den Berg, “The Subject and his Landscape.” Romanticism and Consciousness. Ed. Harold Bloom. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1970), 57.

[80] Quoted in Van den Berg, 61.

[81] Ibid.

[82] This is not to say anything about their truth-content. We are interested them now, for what they can tell us about the self developing beneath their surface. Remember, we are not talking about a history of ideas but of an evolution of consciousness.

[83] HEW, 158.

[84] HEW, 170.

[85] HEW, 149.

[86] Aristotle describes the actus/potentia distinction this way: “As a man who is building is to one who knows how to build, as waking is to sleeping, that which sees to that which has sight but has eyes shut, that which is shaped out of matter to its matter, the finished product to he raw material, so in general is actuality to potentiality.” (Metaphysics 1048b). Quoted in Bruce Aune, “Possibility.” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy Vol. 6. Ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 420.

[87] SA, 93-94.

[88] HEW, 166.

[89] Cf. Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy. (London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1946, 1979), 529f.

[90] SA, 50-51.

[91] SA, 62.

[92] Reilly, Romantic Religion, 53.

[93] WA, 166.

[94] Ibid., 137.

[95] Rilke, Rainer Maria. Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke. Stephen Mitchell, ed. and transl. (New York: The Modern Library, 1995), p. 379.

[96] SM, 113-114.

[97] Ibid. 138.

[98] Ex. 20:4.

[99] SA, 109.

[100] SA, 110.

[101] SA, 109.

[102] Ibid.

[103] Ps. 104:1b-2.

[104] Ibid., 108.

[105] Ibid.

[106] SA, 112.

[107] SA, 114.

[108] 1Kgs. 19:11-13.

[109] SA, 114.

[110] Ibid., 113.

[111] Ibid., 114.

[112] Ibid.

[113] SA, 128.

[114] Ibid., 128-129.

[115] Quoted in SA, 128. Emphasis added.

[116] Ibid., 128-129.

[117] Russel, 655.

[118] SA, 131.

[119] SA, 130.

[120] SA, 132.

[121] Wordsworth. “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.” The Selected Poetry and Prose of Wordsworth. (New York: Signet Classics, 1970), 104. Italics added.

[122] Coleridge, “Ode to Dejection.” Quoted in SA, 130.

[123] PD, 88.

[124] SA, 127.

[125] Barfield explains his use of the word ‘final’ saying, “I simply mean the kind of participation that may begin after original participation has ceased… It is unfortunate that the word ‘final’ has eschatological overtones. I would recommend the reader picture final participation as a direction in which we had all better be moving, rather than as a beatific consummation at which we might in some remote future arrive.” SA, 8.

[126] SA, 137.

[127] This language is appropriate for in Barfield’s view, at least in a general fashion, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

[128] SA, 8.

[129] To continue the ontogenetic comparison, final participation looks in many ways like the higher levels of psycho-spiritual development as outlined by James Fowler. In particular, Fowler’s fifth and sixth stages (Conjunctive and Universalizing) which emphasize paradox, imagination and interconnectivity, seem a striking ontogenetic similarity to the phylogenetic stage of final participation that Barfield predicts. Cf., James Fowler. Stages of Faith. (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981).

[130] SA, 137.

[131] Cf. footnote 37 above.

[132] A surface reading of such involution raises all sorts of Manichean flags, but we must recognize what Barfield is saying. He is not, on the one hand, denigrating matter as some sort of spiritual contaminant. Far from it! “Matter” was necessary for the development of the ego which was the whole project of past evolution. Let us remember further, just how Barfield understands “matter”. If by matter we means a Cartesian substance divorced from mind then Barfield doesn’t believe in it at all. Barfield’s objective idealist view is that matter is essentially “coagulated spirit”, things only exist inasmuch as they exist in Mind, whether human or otherwise. This need not rob the creation of any of its dignity. As Barfield says, “Is God’s creation less awe-inspiring because I know that the light, for instance, out of which its visual substance is woven, streams forth from my own eyes?” SA, 159.

[133] RCA, 230.

[134] SA, 144.

[135] SA, 146.

[136] Ibid.

[137] Rom. 8:19-23.

[138] SA, 147.

[139] SA, 161.

[140] HEW, 107.

[141] Ibid., 117.

[142] RCA, 127.

[143] HEW., 118.

[144] Ibid., 119.

[145] Cf. WCT, 149.

[146] UV, 99, 114.

[147] WCT, 145.

[148] To the extent that any pole contains its contrary, we can see God (rather, the Father) present and one with nature, but this is a highly nuanced statement, one that cannot be divorced from the imaginative perception of polarity.

[149] Barfield never tires of reminding us that we must not fail to distinguish what we may not be able to divide. The perichoresis of the Trinity is a case in point. Creation too, in Barfield’s view, cannot be divided from God lest it fail to exist, but it must be distinguished. Furthermore, the creation-Creator polarity is not a polarity of equals. The only polarity of true and total equals is the polarity of the Divine Trinity.

[150] WCT, 148.

[151] RM, 169.

[152] SA, 165.

[153] SA, 136.

[154] SA, 167.

[155] SA, 160.

[156] SA, 170-171.

[157] Reilly, “A Note on Barfield, Romanticism, and Time.” Studies in Polarity, 189.

[158] SA, 182.

[159] SA, 168.

[160] SA, 185.

[161] This is the tendency that C. S. Lewis noted so well in his Abolition of Man. He describes how moderns rail against a statement like “That waterfall is sublime.” No, they counter, it simply feels sublime to you.

[162] RM, 232.

[163] RM, 234.

[164] RM, 235.

[165] RM, 235.

[166] RM, 236. Barfield’s claim in this regard is supported by the fact that, in his earliest work and decades before he ever joined the church, Barfield articulates such startling conclusions. Cf. HEW, 213.

[167] UV, 93.

[168] UV, 114.

[169] SA, 185.