Darwin
Teilhard
Plato
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For Barfield, of course,
there was no "descent of man" as Darwin
(or for that matter Teilhard de Chardin) conceived
of it: though accepting of the idea of evolution,
Barfield drew upon the use of the metaphor
as understood in a tradition stretching back to Plato
and beyond.1
Consider Burgeon's
discussion of the descent in Worlds Apart:
"But in
the past," Burgeon objected, "there still remained some memory of pre-existence.
And when that was gone, there still remained the tradition. Why is it that
all the myths of men's origin, without exception, tell of a descent--a
descent from some former state of happy intercourse with the gods into
present exclusion from it, from a paradisal state of light and joy into
an earthy one of sorrow and darkness? I defy you to find a single myth
that portrays an ascent from unconsciousness to consciousness, from ape
to man, from matter to spirit. Why not, if it was the fact? Why should
those who were still near to the great change know nothing of it, report
nothing of it?
I will tell you
why. It is because the story of a linear ascent is itself the product of
the last stage of total exile from even the memory of the light--the last
darkness in which there is nothing left to do, but play the guessing-game
with the help of the language-game. I should have thought the analogy was
plain to high heaven! And if there has indeed occurred this imprisonment,
this descent into the darkness of the material world--and what else is
the history of Western civilization?--why may the West not work its way
towards an awakening?--an awakening, if you like, to what it has always
been in the spirit. . . ." (WA 87)
If humanity did not
"descend" in the Darwinian sense, the question still remains: where did
we come from? Barfield's answer (offered here by Sanderson in Worlds
Apart) is heretical to the core but a central pillar of his thinking
nonetheless:
I say [man]
was there, in his unconscious, from the beginning. And I say it is just
that beginning to which those paradise-myths. . . , found all over the
earth, point back; . . . they are a dim recollection in tradition of the
state of affairs that obtained before his more conscious life developed.
. . . Why do none of the myths anywhere symbolize [the] ascent of man from
animals . . .? (159-60)
See in particular
"Man, Thought, and Nature" (RCA 223-240) and "Philology and the
Incarnation" (RM 228-36). |
1Drawing
on the work of one of the great scholars of Romanticism, Barfield supplies
(in "The Rediscovery of Allegory II") an historical perspective on the
descent metaphor:
In his Natural Supernaturalism, M. H. Abrams lays his finger on the difference between [Neo-Platonic thought
& evolution] by remarking that we have transformed Plotinus's emanation
into evolution. That is to say, we have ceased to conceive of ascent or
'progress' as representing in any sense a 'return' to the world of archetypes
behind the symbols, to the home where with our authentic humanity we belong.
. . . But the crucial issue between ascent only and ascent-cum-descent
is, I fancy one that will have to be faced before long. . . . And I should
say that the necessity of facing that issue will bring into focus an even
more crucial one. For the concept of a descent of man presupposes the validity
of that overall view of the relation between mind and matter-anathema today
to intellectual establishments of both Left and Right-which the Scholastic
philosophers classified in their succinct way as the doctrine of universalia
ante rem. (RM 109)
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