|
The developmental period known as puberty should
be understood in terms of the evolution
of consciousness. Barfield scattered comments concerning puberty are
almost wholly drawn from the ideas of Rudolf Steiner.
As the Meggid explains
to Burgeon in Unancestral Voice, adolescence has not always presented
the problems it now presents, for the nature of childhood has changed:
In the past the growing child could
accord an instinctive respect to grown-up minds which were held in the
same nimbus of instinct as his own. His judgment could accept their judgments
with a certain reverence. And that is what he needs above all things in
the period before puberty. Already, in that period, he can no longer be
satisfied with merely imitating his elders, as he did when he was still
a baby. But he is not yet self-determined enough to meet their judgments
with his own, as equal to equal. He needed, in those earlier year of his,
not so much "to think for himself"--for any such thinking
will be a mockery--he needed to lean on tradition, and on authority and
example which he could respect. Should he have had that in the years before
his teenage--when he must indeed begin to think for himself--then he comes
to that age strengthened and in a measure prepared. But [our] era no longer
has the instinct out of which it can give him that. . . . it must look
now to another source than instinct.
The child lucky enough to have "that boon"--to
possess authoritative models he can respect--"will indeed begin after puberty
to pass his own judgments on the world about him, but he will not simply
refuse to listen to all who judge differently." But that situation seldom
occurs in the modern world.
As it is today, let us suppose he
does listen occasionally--what does he hear? What does he hear in the talk
that goes on in his family, what does he hear when he turns on the radio,
or read when he opens a newspaper? He hears only the chaotically conflicting
judgments of an adult world which is, at bottom, in the same predicament
as himself. He has just tumbled, as it were, into a deep dry gulf between
thought and instinct, which were formerly one within him, and there is
no help for him, because the world into which he is awakening is in that
very same gulf. Neither his teachers, if he still has any, nor any other
adult companions can help him to bridge the gulf, because they have as
yet found no bridge themselves. Now that
instinct
itself no longer affords a bridge, they know of no way to and fro across
the void that yawns between an impotent thinking emancipated from instinct
on the one side, and, on the other, a dehumanized instinct emancipated
from thought. (UV 47-48)
For the modern age, then, the age of the consciousness
soul, puberty is "the age in the age" (UV 48).
See in particular
Unancestral Voice,
Chap. 4. |
|