| The Church |
In general Barfield
portrays the church as a exoteric popularizer of Christ's more esoteric
wisdom. "very early in its career," Barfield writes in History in English
Words, . . .
the leaders of the infant Church must have realized two things--firstly, that those who, like the Gnostics, were passionately interested in philosophical and mystical interpretations of the life of Christ, not only differed very widely among themselves, but also paid little attention to that personal life of Jesus, as recorded in the Gospels, whose sweetness was beginning to bind men together with marvelous new ties; secondly, that the simple and ignorant people to whom, according to the Gospels, Jesus addressed Himself almost exclusively, would be quite incapable of grasping these interpretations. If Christianity was to spread, it must be simplified. (115-16)Their simplification was wonderfully successful. The teachings of Christ became the new common sense.
Somewhere about a hundred years after His death, the life of Christ was written by the four Evangelists and others. Out of these ideas and emotions arose, in the first place, the dogma and the ritual of the Catholic Church, and in the second place a great part of the ordinary thoughts and feelings and impulses of will which flourish in the bosoms of modern Europeans and Americans. (HEW 115)This historical process largely succeeded in masking its making. The largely borrowed, cut and paste, pastiche ideas of Christianity became gospel and, eventually dogma due to the ingenious work of the "incredibly industrious" fathers of the Church who
busied themselves in editing and selecting from the literature and traditions of a hundred semi-Christian sects. Doctrines which had taken a very strong hold on many imaginations were accepted, given the orthodox stamp, and incorporated in the canon; others were rejected, and being pursued at first with a mixture of genuine logic, misrepresentation, and invective, and, as the Church grew stronger, with active persecution,1 gradually vanished away or dwindled down to obscure apocryphal manuscripts, some of which have only recently been partially translated within the last few decades. Thus, for more than ten centuries, creeds and dogmas, to the accompaniment of immense intellectual and physical struggles, were petrified into ever clearer and harder forms. Christianity became identified with Catholic doctrine, and soon after the Church's authority was backed by that of the Roman Empire, any other form of it might be punished by death. (HEW 116-17)The church has thus not remained a friend to the evolution of consciousness, for reasons Barfield articulates in Saving the Appearances: "I suspect that for the Church," he writes, acceptance of the evolution of consciousness "will not be easy. It will not be easy for the nursing mother to accept the possibility that her charge has grown to need additional nourishment; or that revelation of the mystery of the kingdom was not turned off at the tap when the New Testament canon was closed, but is the work of an earth-time" (184-85).