Tag: Spirit

Owen Barfield and the Mystery of the Word

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.


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Reflections on a Passage from “Meaning, Revelation and Tradition in Language and Religion”

The following contains some thoughts inspired by a very striking passage in Barfield’s late essay “Meaning, Revelation and Tradition in Language and Religion.” In reflecting on the Incarnation, he considers what it would mean for a divine-human person to speak. He suggests that—while an ordinary human child, in beginning to speak, is bound by the limitations of human memory (and, it is implied, by a language into which they are born, with its sedimented history of meaning)—Christ was either not limited in this way, or the limitation was “voluntarily accepted.”


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