Steiner
Hegel
Coleridge
Goethe
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A religious philosophy,
or a "spiritual science" (RCA 12)--its central belief the assumption
"that nature has indeed a spiritual life, a spiritual substance of her
own, which she preserves quite independently of man" (RCA 210)--to
which Barfield was an adherent since the late 1920s, Anthroposophy was
founded by the German occult philosopher Rudolf
Steiner (1861-1925) after (because of) his break with theosophy. Anthroposophy
teaches that human kind's evolving consciousness is the result of--inextricable
from--cosmic, extra-personal processes; that man evolves from original
participation, to the age of the intellectual
soul, to the age of the consciousness
soul (the present), to final participation
and the imaginative soul.
Barfield heard Steiner
speak only once, in his twenties, and from that time on was greatly influenced
by his prolific writings, becoming a well known proselytizer for Anthroposophy
and an adherent of his teachings and of the faith that "through Rudolf
Steiner there was revealed the gradual entrusting of the Cosmic Intelligence
to man, of which the Incarnation of the
Word was the central event, and which is the meaning of history" (RCA
189). Prior to his first encounter with Steiner, however, Barfield had
already discovered many of the central tenets of Anthroposophy independently.
"From one point of
view," Barfield notes, "Anthroposophy is a new and startling phenomenon
in the history of the mind. From another it can be seen as the natural
and inevitable development of intellectual and philosophical impulses which
had begun to manifest before Steiner was born."1
Barfield's (and Steiner's) Romantic precursors had also anticipated Anthroposophy's
key ideas.
The thinking
of others, such as Hegel and the
Nature-Philosophers
in Germany and Coleridge in England, had taken
the same direction, but none of them had achieved their aim so authoritatively
or so completely. Coleridge could write, rather vaguely, of "organs of
spirit," with a latent function analogous to that of our more readily available
organs of sense, and Goethe could apply his "objective
thinking" to supplement causality with metamorphosis. But neither of them
could carry cognition of spirit beyond spirit-as-phenomenally-apparent
in external nature. It was in Steiner that Western mind and western method
first achieved cognition of pure spirit. The others were all apostles of
Imagination in its best sense, Steiner alone of those profounder levels
which he himself termed Inspiration and Intuition, but which may together
be conceived of as Revelation in the form appropriate to this age--as a
mode of cognition to which the noumenal ground of existence is accessible
directly, and not only through its phenomenal manifestation; to which therefore
even the remote past can become an open book. (LS 97-98)
If Anthroposophy had
early 19th century antecedents, it resonates as well with developments
in 20th century thought.
Much influenced by
developments in modern science, especially 20th century physics' discovery
of the participatory nature of reality,2
Barfield finds surprising similarities in its discoveries and the teachings
of Anthroposophy: "That it is an illusion to imagine nature unperceived
as being or remaining 'the same thing' as nature perceived is a truth about
which Anthroposophy and modern Physics agree." But there is, of course,
a different--a qualitative difference:
Modern Physics
assumes for its purposes that Nature unperceived consists of some kind
of network of waves or particles. What does Anthroposophy assume? That
Nature unperceived is the unconscious, sleeping being of humanity; just
as Nature perceived is the self-reflection of waking humanity. (RCA
211)
It is this belief, of
course, which makes Anthroposophy, and the thought of Owen Barfield as
well, heretical.
In an essay on "Listening
to Steiner," Barfield succinctly summarizes Anthroposophy's "basic principles"
in the following way:
-
The evolution of the
world is, and always has been, essentially an evolution
of consciousness; and the material and biological evolution, which
is its outward expression, will never be known, though it may be tinkered
with, until that is fully realized.
-
In the course of that
evolution matter has emerged from mind and not mind from matter. Spirit
must first take on the form of a material brain in order to lead in this
form the life of the conceptual world, which can bestow upon man in his
earthly life freely acting self-consciousness.
To be sure, in the brain spirit mounts upward out of matter, but only after
the material brain has arisen out of spirit.
-
In its later stages
evolution is coterminous with the evolution of human perceiving and thinking.
That does not mean a "history of ideas"
refracted from particular heads, but a progressive development of the whole
relation between the inner and the outer world.
-
The verb "to evolve"
requires a single subject if it is not to be meaningless. The age-long
evolution of individuality--that is, of individual selves or egos--out
of a general and participating consciousness, is accordingly not conceivable
except in terms of repeated earth lives (reincarnation),
just as the evolution of a natural species is inconceivable without repeated
individual embodiments in the course of which it acquires its special form.
-
The central form in
evolution, that is, of the painful emergence of a subjective and specifically
"human" consciousness out of that original participation in the phenomenal
world which the myths reflect, and its advance to man's final participation
in that world as an individual free spirit, was the historical life, death,
and resurrection of Christ.
-
That stage in the evolution
of consciousness which gave rise to, and has been urged forward by, the
scientific revolution in the West is, on the one hand, responsible for
the prevailing materialism of the present age. On the other hand it is
that which has made possible exact knowledge both of nature and of spirit.
Up to now this has only been realized in relation to knowledge of nature,
and there only in a very limited (predominately mineral) sphere. Correlatively,
however, it has made possible exact knowledge of man's own spirit and of
the spiritual world of which he is a part. Organs of perception giving
rise to such knowledge are latent in all human beings, but can only be
developed and brought into activity by arduous and persevering endeavor.
-
Steiner himself developed
these organs to an extraordinary degree and applied them to many, or nearly
all, realms of knowledge. His books and lectures consist in the main of
the findings of his spiritual research in those different realms. (LS 98-99)
In its simplest terms,
Anthroposophy, then, should be thought of as "a path of knowledge to guide
the Spiritual in the Human Being to the Spiritual in the Universe" (RCA
234: Barfield is quoting Steiner). "Men have called me also Sophia," the
Meggid explains in Unancestral Voice's peroration, Barfield's
most concise exposition of Anthroposophy's central teachings:
Once I was
the ancestral voice of the Father-wisdom, the theosophia that spoke inarticulately
through blood and instinct, but articulately through the
sibyls,
the prophets, the masters. But at the turning-point of time, by that central
death and rebirth which was the transformation of transformations, by the
open mystery of Golgotha, I was myself transformed. I am that anthroposophia
who . . . is the voice of each one's mind speaking from the depths within
himself. (163)
See in particular
Romanticism
Comes of Age (passim), Unancestral Voice,
passim
(in which the Meggid serves as Anthroposophy's mouthpiece), and Worlds
Apart,
passim (where the character Sanderson is an Anthroposophist). |
1As
Barfield observes in Romanticism Comes of Age, "[Anthroposophy]
begins to look much more like a coming-to-the-surface at last, and out
of the clear light of day, of something that has long been at work in the
dark--or nearly in the dark . . . half-hidden, always trying to reach the
surface, and occasionally succeeding in doing so-for a brief period, and
perhaps in an unexpected form . . . then vanishing again into obscurity"(
232). |
2"Nothing
is more important about the quantum principle than this," the noted physicist
John Wheeler has shown, "that it destroys the concept of the world as 'sitting
out there,' with the observer safely separated from it by a 20-centimeter
slab of plate glass. Even to observe so minuscule an object as an electron,
he must shatter the glass. He must reach in. he must install his chosen
measuring equipment. it is up to him to decide whether he shall measure
position or momentum. . . . . the measurement changes the state of the
electron. The universe will never be the same. To describe what has happened,
one has to cross out the old word 'observer' and put in its place the new
word 'participator.' In some strange sense, the universe is a participatory
universe" (Capra 127-28). |
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