In his lectures, Rudolf Steiner spoke on a number of occasions about the enactment of a decree at the 8th Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in the year 869 – in defiance of the view of the Eastern Church, represented by Patriarch Photius – to the effect that man does not have a spirit but only a soul with certain spiritual attributes. Steiner adds that the Catholic Church has done its best to instil this notion in the minds of those belonging to Western Christendom, thus in his view laying the foundations for the Scientific Revolution and the materialistic paradigm.

Those familiar with Owen Barfield’s book Unancestral Voice will recall how in chapter 8 Burgeon, or Barfield himself, launches a diatribe against his Catholic companion Chevalier in this connection (his other companion, the Buddhist, Grimwade, having no real relationship to the notion of evolution, has retired from the scene). The essence of what he now says to Chevalier is that the enactment of this decree in 869 has led to a model of Christianity which has no place for its central spiritual core and has therefore “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”. Readers will remember that this conversation is followed in chapter 9 by an attempt by Burgeon or Barfield to express an understanding of that central spiritual core in terms of the “interior transforming agent”, the Logos or Word.

But it was not enough for Barfield that these insights are entertained at the level of ideas; they must become realities in our inner experience. Thus when he speaks of the divine origin of man in terms of the beginning of St. John’s Gospel, he is also speaking of the pre-existence of the soul before birth and repeated earthly lives, of the unfolding evolution of the individual human spirit. In a lecture that he gave on 31st August 1958 in Zeist, Holland, entitled “‘The Son of God’ and ‘The Son of Man’”, he entered more fully than perhaps anywhere else into this contrast. I cannot do more than hint at the scope of his analysis of the concepts in this title, but essentially the term “Son of God” refers to man’s divine origin through Adam, while the term “Son of Man” denotes the potential of future human development based on freedom. Barfield points out that Christ – perhaps somewhat surprisingly – almost invariably refers to Himself as “The Son of Man”, on the grounds that – in Barfield’s understanding – His whole impulse through His Incarnation was to stand for the possibilities inherent in being such a “Son of Man”, which pre-eminently include the promoting of human freedom. At the time of the Incarnation, pagan religions had an abundant awareness of what it means to be a “Son of God” in this sense. Barfield’s case in this lecture is to point out that this situation is reversed in our time, and that there is now a need to rediscover “the other kind of sonship, …the one from which history really began, and which is by its nature unfree, …an ‘archetypal’ sonship”. He adds that “it is important precisely because it is not specifically Christian. In my feeling”, he says, “it is something which, as it comes to be more and more realised, will be seen to be that which Christianity possesses in common with the old pagan religions. …[Albert] Schweitzer has pointed out somewhere that religion, in the West, has narrowed or atrophied in this respect; it has become more and more exclusively equated with ethics. Thus it has become supposed that religion is solely a matter of personal relations and individual and moral development. This, he [Schweitzer] feels to be a constricting atrophy and one reason for its pathetic weakness. It is perhaps the main reason.”

It is interesting in this respect to note that Barfield was brought up in an agnostic, free-thinking household. His mother, for example, was a zealous advocate of women’s rights, and he had no background in organised religion of any kind. He subsequently joined the Church of England in 1949, but this should be understood not in terms of a conversion but, I think, as a deed of social solidarity with his wife and his dear friend C. S. Lewis. He might have hoped that such a step could have made it more possible for him to be appointed as Lewis’s successor at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1954, but his ideas were clearly too heterodox for the college to adhere to Lewis’s own wishes in this respect.

Equally, since his death he has never fitted properly anywhere: he is too difficult for many anthroposophists, too anthroposophical for many evangelical Christians, and too Christian for enthusiasts of paganism. May this gathering on his birthday mark a new phase in developing an awareness of his rich legacy!

These remarks were made at the symposium on Owen Barfield, arranged by the Temenos Academy and Rudolf Steiner House in the Marylebone Theatre in London, titled “Poetic Imagination and the Rediscovery of Meaning”, held on the 127th anniversary of his birth, on 9th November 2025.