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"Before the scientific revolution the world was more like a garment men wore about them than a stage on which they moved," Barfield writes in Saving the Appearances. The men and women of the Middle Ages existed in a very different stage in the evolution of consciousness. "In such a world the convention of perspective was unnecessary. . . . It was as if the observers were themselves in the picture. Compared with us, they felt themselves and the objects around them and the words that expressed those objects, immersed together in something like a clear lake of--what shall we say?--of 'meaning,' if you choose. It seems the most adequate word" (94-95). Seeking to explain the change that has occurred in our outlook from the Medieval to the modern, Barfield offers the following Gedanken [thought] experiment:
"In his relation to [the] environment," Barfield insists, "the man of the middle ages was rather less like an island, rather more like an embryo, than we are" (SA 78). "The universe was a kind of theophany, in which he participated at different levels, in being, in thinking, in speaking or naming, and in knowing" (SA 92). Indeed, "The phenomena [of the middle sges] themselves carried the sort of multiple significance which we today only find in symbols" (SA 74). Barfield is especially interested in the medieval understanding of language and the way it shaped its increasingly "literal" mindset. In "Speech, Reason and Imagination" (in Romanticism Comes of Age), he observes that "To Plato, dialogue was a tokos--a begetting; the words of one speaker were conceived of as merely the instruments by which true thinking, itself beyond words, was 'begotten' or generated in another." In the Middle Ages, however,
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