What Barfield Thought: An Introduction to the Work of Owen Barfield
If I were forced to select a single passage from C. S. Lewis’s hefty corpus that sums up most fully his genius for uniting reason and imagination, for exposing the fault lines in the monolith of modernism, and for expressing profound insights in the simplest of terms, I would choose one that occurs in Chapter 14 of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. In this memorable scene, Eustace Clarence Scrubb meets a magician named Ramandu, who, as it turns out, is a retired star.
When Eustace, a smug, unimaginative boy who has been saved by Aslan but who yet retains vestiges of his naturalistic, scientistic education, learns the truth about Ramandu, he is taken aback by how different things are in Narnia. On the earth where he comes from, Eustace explains to Ramandu, stars are nothing more than huge balls of flaming gas. “Even in your world, my son,” Ramandu replies, “that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”
We post-Enlightenment moderns have made great strides in transportation, communication, medicine, and technology, but we have, in the process, lost our ability to see. We observe and study (and manipulate) the physical world well enough, but we seem both unable and unwilling to see past the surface of things. We think because we know what parts of the brain light up when we fall in love that we understand the mystery of love. We think because we have learned to change male and female body parts that we understand the essence of masculinity and femininity. We think because we have manufactured pills for depression that we understand the inner workings of the human psyche, which we have, in any case, reduced to the physical brain.
When Romantic poet William Blake was asked whether the rising sun did not appear to him as “a round disc of fire, somewhat like a guinea,” he responded, “Oh! No! No! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying, ‘Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God almighty.”1 Blake, refusing to accept the Enlightenment mandate to reduce all phenomena to their natural, physical, material properties, pierced past what the sun is made of to perceive what it is—a beacon in the universe of God’s glory, holiness, and power.
I do not quote this anecdote directly from Blake but borrow it from Landon Loftin and Max Leyf who themselves borrow it from Owen Barfield (1898-1997). In What Barfield Thought: An Introduction to the Work of Owen Barfield, Loftin, a chaplain and teacher from Missouri, and Leyf, a Rolfer, anthroposopher, and philosopher from Alaska, do a commendable job synthesizing and condensing the incisive, yet esoteric theories of Barfield into a mere 126 pages. In addition to presenting Barfield “as a profound and original thinker in his own right” (1), apart from the famous people he influenced (C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Saul Bellow, Marshall McLuhan, Harold Bloom, etc.), Loftin and Leyf help us to understand what it was about Barfield’s work that exerted such an influence on such diverse thinkers.
Barfield opened a door to the past, revealing, not what the ancients and medievals thought about the world around them, but how they thought about that world. Before the Enlightenment altered the way our consciousness interacts with the physical world, nature and mind, the material and the immaterial, the perceived object and the perceiving subject were not mutually exclusive categories. In their examination of Barfield’s analysis of the Blake anecdote, Loftin and Leyf cut to the heart of the change in cognition that gave birth to the modern world: “Blake was not, of course, giving a materially literal description of what he saw, but he rejected the modern prejudice that statements can only be true insofar as they are literally true in this way the sun, for Blake, [was not] merely a convenient metaphor for the glory of God; it was, rather, a real expression of such” (107).
This passage appears near the end of What Barfield Thought; to understand it fully, we must flip back to the beginning of the book and follow Loftin and Leyf as they unpack the many layers and dimensions of Barfield’s musings on language, poetry, and consciousness. They start with a biographical overview that introduces us to a man who wrote two studies of language in his twenties (History in English Words and Poetic Diction) 2. Unable to make a living as a writer, he worked as a solicitor for twenty-eight years, then, upon retirement, devoted the rest of his long life to writing many more books (including Saving the Appearances, Worlds Apart, and What Coleridge Thought)3 and serving as a visiting professor at various colleges and universities across America and Canada. Though a committed Christian, Barfield remained throughout his life a disciple of the decidedly heterodox Rudolph Steiner (1861-1925), the founder of anthroposophy. Ever since Christianity became institutionalized in the fourth century, Steiner taught, man has increasingly cut himself off from the universe around him. Whereas people once experienced ideas and nature in a direct, unmediated way, they now view nature scientifically as a dead object cut off from their own individual, subjective identity. Anthroposophy sought, via the trinity of imagination, inspiration, and intuition, to heal this rupture of subject and object.
Poetic Diction, which began its life as Barfield’s bachelor thesis at Oxford, shows the influence of Steiner as well as that of contemporary language theorists, while also revealing Barfield’s own genius. Loftin and Leyf do a particularly fine job distinguishing between the philological data Barfield inherited and how he interpreted that data in a uniquely original way. According to the received wisdom of Barfield’s day, languages “were originally composed almost entirely of words that referred exclusively to particular, concrete, sensible objects.” However, as “humans developed the capacity for reason, the need arose to express increasingly general, abstract, and insensible ideas.” To do this they had to repurpose old words for new uses. “This process of repurposing was accomplished through the deliberate use of metaphor or simile” (37).
While acknowledging the clear evidence for the concrete nature of pre-modern language and the even clearer evidence for the abstract nature of our own, Barfield questioned the presuppositions that drove the historicist theories of modern philologists. More and more Christians today have come to understand the difference between exegesis (drawing out of biblical texts what they are saying) and eisegesis (reading into biblical texts our own prejudices and agendas). What Barfield came to see after studying intensively ancient and medieval literature is that “the received view in respect to the origin and phylogeny of language is less a case of reasoning from evidence to theory than of assuming a foregone theory at the outset and then selectively gathering and assembling evidence to rationalize it post hoc” (38).
Blinded by what Barfield would teach Lewis to call “chronological snobbery,” modern theorists took for granted that their own grasp of the world, of truth, and of reality was superior to that of the “primitive” people who lived before them. Because we are incapable of thinking of something simultaneously as concrete and abstract, we assume that the people of the past were equally divided in their thinking. In fact, it is we, not they, who lack the ability to experience the world, and to express our experience of it, in a manner that unites physical and spiritual, material and immaterial. We have lost “the ancient semantic unity in language” (39).
Our scientific language surpasses theirs in its ability to capture every nuance of conceptual and theoretical thought, but that gain has come at a price. “[T]he thoughts and the expressions characteristic of modern English forfeit in fullness what they gain in precision; English words are at once less rich and more exact than their ancient Greek counterparts” (41). The reason why English translators of John 3 have a hard time capturing the wordplay on “wind/Spirit” in Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus is that the Greek word pneuma means both the concrete wind that one can feel blowing on his face and the abstract Spirit that cannot be perceived by the senses. The Greeks could get by with a single word because their experience of pneuma was univocal.
Just as the ancients did not make a sharp, finally artificial division between the concrete and the abstract, so they did not conceive of themselves as passive, outside observers of nature. They participated in and with nature in a way that one sometimes sees in children, but which tends to be lost in adults. The reason for that loss is that modern people are self-conscious of themselves and of nature in a way that pre-modern people were not. It is not just our beliefs, our actions, and our choices that have changed; it is our very consciousness that has evolved.
Because it is our consciousness, and not just our presuppositions, that evolved, we cannot make a simple return to what Barfield calls “original participation.” Still, Barfield believed, poetry can provide us with a backward glimpse of a time when nature spoke through the poet, rather than vice versa. Poetry can help moderns recover “some small part of this ancient participation through the use of fitting metaphors, which suggest forgotten connections between our inner life and the outer world. These metaphors, each in their own way, free one’s thinking from the detached mental world of abstract thoughts, and renew the lost sense of participation that makes apprehension of meaning in nature possible” (48).
This we feel and experience when we read ancient and medieval poetry, for poets then were, quite literally, inspired: filled with the spirit of God or the gods. Poets today are cut off from such inspiration from without, for they are too self-conscious to participate directly with nature. That is why they must rely, as Romantic poets like Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley relied, on imagination from within to create a new, more mature relationship between mind and nature, subject and object. We cannot go back to original participation, but we can go forward, through a marriage of participation and self-consciousness, to what Barfield calls “final participation.”
Such a marriage, however, becomes impossible if we accept the conventional, Darwinian view “that consciousness emerged at some point in evolution as a sort of epiphenomenon of brain processes, resulting from the conjectured survival and reproductive utility that it, ex hypothesi, must have conferred on our ancestors.” Thankfully, the Christian Barfield “emphatically reject[ed] this sim- plistic view,” believing firmly that the “mind is not an afterthought to nature” (76). As both Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1 affirm, God-word-mind-consciousness precede the creation of matter. Mind and matter, spirit and body can only truly be fitted to one another if mind-spirit has an integrity of its own that did not evolve out of unconscious material processes.
Barfield helped give the lie to a Darwinian, post-Enlightenment story that moderns have absorbed with their mother’s milk: “ancient humans lived in ignorance of the actual causes of natural phenomena and, being ruled by fear and superstition, projected the dynamics of their own psyches onto the outer world, anthropomorphizing all things and contriving to see will and agency behind everything that happened. Eons of superstitious animism elapsed before, almost of a sudden, people were delivered from their primitive beliefs by the advent of the scientific method” (99). Because so many of us, outside and inside the church, have accepted this false narrative, we have also accepted a false dichotomy that limits our choices to worshipping nature like a pagan or separating ourselves completely from her.
Barfield holds open a third way for Christians who long to feel connected again to the world that God created. After sharing the anecdote Blake discussed above, Loftin and Leyf unpack a pregnant analogy that Barfield makes between properly reading a book and properly reading nature. Just as a man who does not understand English will only see ink marks on a page that signify nothing beyond themselves, so a modern man who accepts the Darwinian story will see only what a star or sun is made of, never what it is or what it proclaims (107-108).
“[O]ne who cannot see more than the outsides of nature,” Loftin and Leyf explain, “cannot see the meaning behind or within it. No amount of scientific experiment or examination can help one get at the inside of natural phenomena, where their real significance is revealed” (108). It is high time that the church, particularly the evangelical church from which I hail, reclaim the fullness of that creation which, Paul tells us, “waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.”4
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Footnotes
- Richard Garnett, William Blake: Painter and Poet (London, UK: Seeley and Company, 1895), https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=File:William_Blake,_painter_and_ poet.djvu&page=7.
- Owen Barfield, History in English Words (London, UK: Faber & Faber, 1953); Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973).
- Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (Wesleyan University Press, 1988); Owen Barfield, Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960s (New South Wales, AU: Barfield Press, 1928); Owen Barfield, What Coleridge Thought (New South Wales, AU: Bar- field Press, 2014.
- Romans 8:19 (ESV).
