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For Barfield spirit may be defined as that "part
of nature which is still coming into Being" (RCA 60). "We have no
percipient access to [spirit]," Barfield reminds, "for the simple reason
that anything we perceive through the senses is, by definition, matter"
(RM 146). Spirit, we must be aware "is not what we can perceive,
but what we are; and experience of spirit must depend not on what we see,
but on the manner in which we look" (RM 150).1
Ironically, our understanding of the nature
of spirit has been drastically curtailed because of the influence of the
church, as Burgeon explains in Unancestral Voice:
[The
Church] eliminated the whole
concept of Spirit--though she still used the word. Removed it from the
category of things needing to be understood, from the category of things
that are knowable, or even thinkable. But she went farther than that. She
denied the very presence of the Spirit in the human soul. By doing so,
she left the West with that forlorn duality of soul and body, of ghost
and machine, which has ever since determined the shape of its science,
its history and its so-called doctrine of evolution. . . . the anathematizing
of the Spirit itself . . . was the disaster, for it was this that severed
humanity from its own past, and in doing so, murdered history. (101)
See in particular "Matter, Imagination, and
Spirit" (RM 143-54). |
1"We are never
more aware of ourselves as immaterial," Barfield observes, "than when we
are in the very act of perceiving" (RM 148). |
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