The text on this page is from David Lavery, "An Owen Barfield Readers Guide." Seven 15 (1998): 97-112. |
Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry. London: Faber and Faber, 1957; reissued New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965; Middletown, CT: Wesleyan U P, 1988. The idols are tough and hard to crack, but through the first real fissure we make in them we find ourselves looking, how deeply, into a new world! If the eighteenth-century botanist, looking for the first time through the old idols of Linnaeus's fixed and time- less classification into the new perspective of biological evolution felt a sense of liberation and of light, it can have been but a candle-flame compared with the first glimpse we now get of the familiar world and human history lying together, bathed in the light of the evolution of consciousness. (Saving the Appearances 72) Barfield’s most important book (his own opinion and by general consensus as well) was the product of a new amount of free time for his intellectual pursuits made possible by diminishing involvement in the law. Saving the Appearances, a book made up of a variety of short but densely packed chapters resulting in a "a sort of outline sketch, with one or two parts completed in greater detail, for a history of human consciousness, particularly the consciousness of western humanity during the last three thousand years or so" (Saving 13), crystallized out of wide reading in anthropology, history of science, and philosophy. It is Since Barfield never authored the magnum opus he once imagined in a poem, Saving the Appearances will have to play that role. It comes closer than any of his other works to laying out methodically, in less than two hundred pages, Barfield’s "system." In writing about Worlds Apart, his next published book, R. J. Reilly has taken note of "the progression" Barfield system intends: an evolution "from the solitude of private thought, to the strengthened thought that rays out into the thought of the universe, to the absolute dissolution of private thought in the universe, or the Kingdom--or from subjective idealism to Anthroposophy to heaven" (76). Saving the Appearances is the Baedeker for such a journey.
|