Responding to Barfield, Part 7: Why Christianity Needs Science (and Even Evolution)

[Back to Part 6]

This series began with "Pre-History Never Happened." One might be excused for thinking that some sort of defense of intelligent design or creationism was in store. I was wondering a little about Barfield at that point, myself. But one would be wrong. Look where we end up: "Why Christianity Needs Evolution." Sorry, IDers.

Barfield is one of the strongest proponents of evolution and Christianity I have read. (He's not necessarily a proponent of SCIENCE, but of evolution. Chew on that one.) This isn't some weak-tea theistic evolution in which God creeps in through quantum randomness, either. Barfield's theology of evolution is much more than that, because God is involved in creating and sustaining perception itself, and Barfield's all about perception. This is about changing how we think so much it changes how we see ("figuration" in Barfield's terms), and this is about moving forward, not back:

p.147-148 “To be able to experience the representations as idols, and then to be able also to perform the act of figuration consciously, so as to experience them as participated; that is imagination. … [T]he way of the West lies, not back but forward; not in withdrawal from the contacts of the senses, but in their transformation and redemption.”

In all of this, Barfield is at war with literalness, a brand of thinking that he sees taking us into all sorts of dead-ends. He puts a lot of the problems commonly associated with Christianity down to a literalness brought about (perhaps ironically) by the scientific revolution, a literalness which fights against, among other things, the very rite of the Eucharist:

p.162-163 “The relation between the mind and heart of man is a delicate mystery, and hardness is catching. It will, I believe, be found that there is a valid connection, at some level however deep, between what I have called ‘literalness’ and a certain hardness of heart. Listen attentively to the response of a dull or literal mind to what insistently presents itself as allegory or symbol, and you may detect a certain irritation, a faint, incipient aggressiveness in its refusal. Here I think is a deep-down moral gesture. … We could pursue the matter further and instance, on the positive side, a certain humble, tender receptiveness of heart which is nourished by a deep and deepening imagination and by the self-knowledge which that inevitably involves. Perhaps this is what Blake had in mind, when he called Imagination ‘The Divine Body of the Lord Jesus, blessed for ever’; but we have digressed too far already from the main road.”

p.159 “[The inner experience of the infinite God], on the one side, and on the other that valiant attempt, which began with the Reformation and ended in Fundamentalism, to understand and accept literally – and only literally – the words of the Bible, precisely while their meanings were being subtly drained away by idolatry – these are the opposite and complementary poles between which Protestantism has hitherto revolved.”

“If this book has succeeded in showing anything, it has shown that the only possible answer to the idolatry with which all our thinking is to-day infected, is the acceptance and conscious ensuing of that directionally creator relation to the phenomenal world, which we know to be a fact, whether we like it or not. Is God’s creation less awe-inspiring because I know that the light, for instance, out of which its visual substance is woven, streams forth from my own eyes? ‘Look upon the rainbow,’ wrote the author of Ecclesiasticus: Look upon the rainbow, and praise him that made it: / very beautiful it is in the brightness thereof. / It compasseth the heavens about with a glorious circle, / and the hands of the most High have bended it.”

“Do I echo these words less warmly, when I recollect that YHWH is creating the rainbow through my eyes? When I know that to think otherwise is an illusion or a pretence? Does piety depend on initial participation? If so, one thing is for certain: there is no future for it. But fortunately it does not. I did not create my eyes. And if an understanding of the manner of my participation in the appearance of a rainbow does not diminish my awe before its Creator, why should that be the case with the other more palpable phenomena?”

The intimate role of our Creator in creating all things, even the rainbow, means that rigorous pursuit of science can be a worshipful end, if you end up putting it at the feet of God (rather than an idol such as science itself). And this wonder of creation, which science can describe so well, needs to be given to those who can't or don't have time to do the experiments themselves. Barfield describes this in my single favorite quote of his (I printed it out, and I hardly ever print out quotes):

p.164 “There will be a revival of Christianity when it becomes impossible to write a popular manual of science without referring to the incarnation of the Word. It is these books, not popular theology (however excellently and simply it is written, as to-day it often is) on which the mind of the proletariat seizes as it awakens from its ancient peasant-dreaming and peasant-wisdom. … The hungry sheep look up and are not fed.”

Christ is creator of science, and even-handed, humble pursuit of science is a worshipful activity. As someone who has tries to do science this way, and who worships Christ, I have come to the conclusion that evolution is consonant with the way God created. For Barfield, that is not enough. He says something along the lines of "if Christianity didn't discover evolution, it would have to invent it" because it goes together with the concept of the Incarnate Word in Christ so perfectly:

p.167 “I believe that the blind-spot which posterity will find most startling in the last hundred years or so of Western civilization, is that it had, on the one hand, a religion which differed from all others in its acceptance of time, and of a particular point in time, as a cardinal element of its faith; that it had, on the other hand, a picture in its mind of the history of the earth and man as an evolutionary process; and that it neither saw nor supposed any connection whatever between the two.”

Could Barfield be right? Once we move away from the literalist objection to evolution, and once we see the process through the lens of the cross, is it possible that Christianity and evolution are long-lost brothers? Barfield thinks so. I came at this from a different starting point, but I think I'm close to Barfield here: I believe Christianity is true (more precisely, that Christ is the truth), and that evolution brought us to this point of the Creator's plan. Can there be a revival of the mind in which the two are joined, not just because it's nice, but because it's necessary?

The other side of evolution being necessary to Christianity is that the theory of evolution cleansed nature of the various pagan idols of stream, forest, and tree. No one leaves offerings to these idols anymore in a real, heartfelt way: our perceptions of the world have simply moved on from what they were in the Roman empire. But that desacralization (is that a word?) of nature led to the manipulation of nature -- science -- which led to our knowledge of nature's mechanisms, and which according to Barfield, has led to our worship of the mechanisms. Barfield doesn't say "chuck it all" -- he says redirect that last step to the triune God:

p.185 “If, in Christ, we participate finally the Spirit we once participated originally; if, in so doing, we participate one another – so that ‘men’ once more become also ‘man’; if, in original participation, we were dreamers and unfree, and if Christ is a Being who can be participated only in vigilance and freedom, then what will chiefly be remembered about the scientific revolution will be the way in which it scoured the appearances clean of the last traces of spirit, freeing us from original, and for final, participation. And if what it produced thereby was, as I have suggested, a world of idols, yet, as Augustine of old could contemplate the greatest of evils and exclaim Felix peccatum! so we, looking steadily on that world, and accepting the burden of existential responsibility which final participation lays on us, may yet be moved to add: Felix eidolon!”

"Blessed sin" and "Blessed fall" from Augustine; "Blessed idols" and "Blessed science" from Barfield.

At the end of this, I know it's about "putting it all together", but I'm not sure what "putting it together" looks like. Maybe we don't need to know when we start. Like N.T. Wright's story about the stoneworker in the cathedral, maybe we work on our incomplete part and then the cathedral builder lifts our little stone and puts it into the right place. At the very least, Barfield provides another way of looking at the world, and in that way, he has put some things together for me. It's worth being able to put on "Barfield glasses" for a while to see how things look different: a bit more like Lewis's and Tolkien's world perhaps, and a bit less like Darwin's but a bit more like Mendel's or Polanyi's? I don't have a strong conclusion to this summary of his thought, except to say if this is true it will gradually fit things together. If it is true, it will grow, and it will be worth thinking of again. I'll think about it and ... well, the rest of the story is what this blog is for. So till then ... felix eidolon!

Responding to Barfield, Part 6: Three Problems (Two Theological, One Scientific)

[Back to Part 5]

I always want to know, what does all this stuff really mean? How does it change how I look at the world and how I act? Barfield addresses this in scattered places throughout Saving the Appearances, and I've pulled out four areas, two theological and two scientific, in which he makes specific interpretations or recommendations that I want to think about. The first three: Eucharist, the Fall, and cancer research, are shorter and I'll put them here. The fourth, evolution, is more central and longer, and that will be part 7.

This writing is fueled by Barfield's view of the importance of participation combined with the avoidance of idolatry. Remember that "original participation" is, historically, living in a world of gods and spirits, animism or polytheism of some sort. Science has removed those gods and spirits (and according to some overzealous proponents threatens to remove the Creator himself), but Barfield's underlying message is that science too has become an idol and has cut us off from the participation in the world that was the silver lining of the gods and spirits. Barfield suggests that we move forward to "final participation" of realizing we are part of this system, that our scientific hypotheses are valid but limited, and that we can now put things together again in a poetic approach to understanding/seeing the world and its connections in which we understand that God is both the transcendent creator and the immanent, nearby spirit who holds all things together in Christ. He puts it this way:

p.172 “Original participation fires the heart from a source outside itself; the images enliven the heart. But in final participation – since the death and resurrection – the heart is fired from within by Christ; and it is for the heart to enliven the images.”

What more vivid form of participation is there than eating and drinking, taking in material from outside yourself and bringing it to become part of you, a participating part? The weird Christian theology that we eat and drink Christ in the Eucharist starts makes sense as Barfield's participation:

p.170 “[T]he tender shoot of final participation has from the first been acknowledged and protected by the Church in the institution of the Eucharist. For all who partake of the Eucharist first acknowledge that the man who was born in Bethlehem was ‘of one substance with the Father’, and that ‘all things were made’ by him; and then they take that substance into themselves, together with its representations named bread and wine. This is after all the heart of the matter. There was no difficulty in understanding it, as long as enough of the old participating consciousness survived. … But, by the physical act of communion as such, men can only take the Divine substance, the ‘Name apart’ directly into the unconscious part of themselves; by way of their blood.”

We could make some atoms in the bread and wine radioactive and trace them -- a few hours later some parts of you would be glowing with radioactivity. (Just a thought experiment!) The bread and wine become part of your system, and since they are part of the body and blood of Christ, he is in you, the suffering servant and the lord of all, the word of God who created the world and holds it together. That's powerful.

Another aspect of the "participating consciousness," as Barfield puts it, is that it is communal, just as words must be shared/spoken between at least two people to be truly part of a language, to truly convey meaning. Because participation is by definition communal (you're "participating" with/in something else), communal bonds and sharing are taken for granted, and something like the fact that the stain from the first human's sin infects all humanity is much more obvious. It doesn't require a "mode of transmission" through genetic material or cultural degradation, it's just obvious that we all participate with each other with our words and that one person is not an island from the others, and can therefore effect the others. So Adam's sin can infect me -- and it can be reversed by the Second Adam as well:

p.183-184 “For instance, a non-participating consciousness cannot avoid distinguishing abruptly between the concept of ‘man’, or ‘mankind’, or even ‘men in general’ on the one hand and that of ‘a man’ – an individual human spirit – on the other. This difficulty did not arise to anything like the same extent as long as original participation survived. Therefore our predecessors were able, quite inwardly, to accept the sin of Adam as being their original sin also. And therefore we are not – because, for us, Adam (if he existed) was after all – somebody else! This has brought with it the loss of the concept of the ‘fallen’ as an essential element in the make-up of human beings; which in its turn is responsible for the devastating shallowness of so much contemporary ethics and contemporary psychology. … When the evolution of phenomena is substituted for our supposed evolution of idols, it will, I believe, be seen without much difficulty that the evolution of the individual human spirit has always proceeded step by step with the evolution of nature; and that both are indeed ‘fallen’. The biological evolution of the human race is, in fact, only one half of the story; the other has still to be told.”

Sin is a brokenness in seeing and acting, and the way we see and act are tangled up with our fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters and neighbors, partially through words and partially through actions. This web of perception was distorted and tainted by the very first person, and has been ever since -- with the one exception of Christ, who showed us how to step outside of that selfish entanglement.

Notice how evolution is part of Barfield's previous quote. Since he's all about words, his discussion is about the body that speaks the words and its biological development as much as it is about spirit and sin (hold that thought for Part 7). The fragmentation and specialization of language that he highlights -- the same fragmentation that is reversed when we put things together through poetic metaphor -- finds its apogee in the highly specialized and precise language of science. This is a natural consequence of the increase of knowledge but is also something to be recognized and reversed, at least at one level.

For all his positive statements about evolution, Barfield is brutal on the subject of chance. For Barfield, statements about the randomness of the universe are a major factor accelerating the fragmentation of knowledge, and who can deny that fragmentation of knowledge is only increasing recently (politically, socially as well), catalyzed by technology?:

p.145 “The hypothesis of chance has already crept from the theory of evolution into the theory of the physical foundation of the earth itself; but, more serious perhaps than that, is the rapidly increasing ‘fragmentation of science’ which occasionally attracts the attention of the British Association. There is no ‘science of sciences’; no unity of knowledge. There is only an accelerating increase in that pigeon-holed knowledge by individuals of more and more about less and less, which, if persisted in indefinitely, can only lead mankind to a sort of ‘idiocy’ (in the original sense of the word) – a state of affairs, in which fewer and fewer representations will be collective, and more and more will be private, with the result that there will in the end be no means of communication between one intelligence and another.”

It bears repeating that this is not anti-science in anything but the philosophical mode of what people mean by "science." It is anti-materialism, but pro-rationality as long as that rationality is kept in context and in community. Even though I titled part I "Pre-history never happened," the models for pre-history are worth looking into, investigating, and figuring out. We just must always remember that they are models:

“The employment of ‘models’ for the purpose of thinking may be very well; for the purposes of exposition it may even be essential – as long as we know what were are doing and do not turn the models into idols. And we shall know what we are doing with pre-history, when we have firmly grasped the fact that the phenomenal world arises from the relation between a conscious and an unconscious and that evolution is the story of the changes that relation has undergone and is undergoing.”

Ok, that last sentence, even I don't really get and I've read two of Barfield's books. So we're not there yet, right? But Barfield puts forward an example of a scientist who saw things and put things together, and did better science, as a result of looking at the world the way Barfield was. This scientist is Rudolf Steiner. I don't know that much about Steiner, actually, but I can tell you some scientists think in the mode that Barfield describes, and that this is a valid form of progress in cancer research:

p.140-141 “Cancer is a process of generation, and once we admit the concept of the potentially phenomenal, we must see that generation is not a transition from not-being to being, but a transition from potential to phenomenal existence. Steiner’s method, based on perception of the potentially phenomenal, was to diagnose a pre-cancerous condition of the blood, a condition not yet detectable by physical symptoms, and thus to take the disease at a stage where it answers better to treatment. … Steiner showed that imagination, and the final participation it leads to, involve, unlike hypothetical thinking, the whole man – thought, feeling, will, and character – and his own revelations were clearly drawn from those further stages of participation – Inspiration and Intuition – to which the systematic use of the imagination may lead.”

Steiner seems to be a polarizing figure. C.S. Lewis had a negative view of him, and questions about Steiner's writing and thinking are one of the major faultlines I can find between Lewis and Barfield. This is probably one of the reasons that Lewis called Barfield the "Second Friend" in Surprised by Joy:

"... the Second Friend is the man who disagrees with you about everything... Of course he shares your interests; otherwise he would not become your friend at all. But he has approached them all at a different angle. he has read all the right books but has got the wrong thing out of every one... How can he be so nearly right, and yet, invariably, just not right?"

I want both Lewis and Barfield to be my friend! I find this example to be something I can at least mull over and think about. What was different about the way Steiner looked at science? And how can we look at science in a similarly different way now? How does this go together with some of H. Gilbert Welch's argument that now we pre-screen too much for cancer because we're thinking of things too mechanically, too analytically? What is the role of Inspiration and Intuition in science?

What do you think?

[Forward to Part 7]

Take Shelter and Owen Barfield

I watched Take Shelter last night and was ambiguously blown away by its ambiguous ending. I saw some connections to good ol' Owen Barfield there and wanted to put them down, even though you shouldn't read this unless 1.) You've seen Take Shelter and 2.) You have read some of Owen Barfield, and you won't be reading this unless 3.) You read this blog. That number is infinitesimal. But I still want to record these thoughts. Spoilerphobes, stop reading now!

At the end, we don't see the storm at first. We see Hannah see it, and she signs it with the word we saw her learn near the beginning of the film: "storm." Then Curtis turns and sees it. Samantha steps out and we can see the reflection of the storm in the glass. It starts to rain oil and she and Curtis exchange glances in an amazingly evocative conversation without words. Samantha says "OK." Fade to black.

Note the role of the words in that sequence. The word "storm" (unspoken even) is the communication that whether in reality or in dreams, Hannah and Samantha have entered Curtis' world of perceptions. "Storm" has moved from Curtis' own private representation to become a collective representation. And Barfield would say that means it has become real. (Wherever two or three are gathered?) They are participating in the same reality.

It is completely ambiguous whether the three are seeing reality or a delusion. I would argue that it doesn't matter (for the purposes of the film). What does matter is that it is shared: that Hannah and Samantha have entered in to Curtis's world. It is their collective reality and it is, as Samantha says, "O.K."

What a unique and unsettling film. I can tell this one will stick with me for a while.

Responding to Barfield, Part 5: The Creative Word of God

[Back to part 4]

If it seems odd that Barfield could wait this long without mentioning the theology of the Word of God, it's only because he was saving up for this moment. Barfield's theology is tied intimately with the concept of wisdom and logos, the word by which Israel's God spoke the world into existence and the logical framework which holds it all together, instant by instant. This God, through his revealed words, gave to Israel His name, YHWH, and the Torah and Temple (think of the long passages in Exodus and the historical books describing these structures, in words). God gave speech too: Adam could name the animals, Moses spoke with God, and David spoke the psalms. In the Hebrew language Barfield hears the origin of the relationship of the heart with God, and the origin of everything, for that matter. And he has a few words about the origin of language, because he sees an active role in language of creating the human mind and therefore (remember part I) in creating the world:

p.123 “Speech did not arise as the attempt of man to imitate, master, or explain ‘nature’; for speech and nature came into being along with one another. [Remember Part 1: Nature did not exist until a mind existed that could step outside of it, and define it.] Strictly speaking, only idolators can raise the question of the ‘origin of language’. For anyone else to do so is like asking for the origin of origin. Roots are the echo of nature herself sounding in man. Or rather, they are the echo of what once sounded and fashioned in both of them at the same time.”

Barfield sees significance in the fact that Hebrew was written with consonants but not vowels, and proposes that these different kinds of sounds embody the coming together of mind and body itself (!):

p.124 “[T]he consonantal element in language [may hold] vestiges of those forces which brought into being the external structure of nature, including the body of man; and, in the original vowel-sounds, the expression of that inner life of feeling and memory which constitutes his soul. It is the two together which have made possible, by first physically and then verbally embodying it, his personal intelligence. … Suffice it to say that the Semitic languages seem to point us back to the old unity of man and nature, through the shapes of their sounds.”

So is the creation of language by the combination of vowels with consonants something like when God breathed on Adam and he became a living soul? And so it makes sense that everything was created by a word, spoken by God, that is, the Word of God:

p.125 “[T]he Jewish doctrine of the Word of God, which was at the same time the source of the phenomenal world and the incarnation of wisdom in man, is still clearly apparent in the Book of Proverbs and in the apocryphal Ecclesiasticus and Wisdom of Solomon. … All things came into being through the Word. This teaching of the creative Word, this last testimony to a creation which was not a mere creation of idols, and to an evolution which was not a mere evolution of idols, is one which Christian thought, thanks to the opening verses of St. John’s gospel, has never been able entirely to ignore, though it has by now come near to doing so.”

In that opening passage of the Gospel of John, this Rabbi from first-century Palestine was placed back at the moment of creation. He was there, as the Word of God and the Wisdom of the Almighty. The words of Jesus recounted in that gospel show him participating (to use Barfield's favorite word) in/with YHWH (not sure what is the right preposition to use here!):

p.169-170 “In the heart of that nation, whose whole impulse it had been to eliminate original participation, a man was born who simultaneously identified himself with, and carefully distinguished himself from, the Creator of the world – whom he called the Father. On the one hand: ‘I am not alone, but I and the Father that sent me,’ etc. On the other: ‘I and the Father are one,’ etc. In one man the inwardness of the Divine Name had been fully realized; the final participation, whereby man’s Creator speaks from within man himself, had been accomplished. The Word had been made flesh.”

The words of Jesus, and especially the parables of Jesus, are saturated with allusions to the Hebrew Scriptures but also with deductions about God's nature from the natural world itself. Barfield points out how an explicit parallel is drawn in Mark between the Parable of the Sower and Isaiah 6, which shows Israel herself beset with idols and darkened in knowledge. Barfield points out that the language is similar to Psalm 135 and many of the other recitations that would be on everyone's mind, about how those who make idols become like them. These words are multi-dimensional and have not yet been exhausted in meaning. As Peter proclaimed, these are the Words of Life:

p.175-176 “Clearly [Jesus’s] whole diction was saturated with recollections of this nature [quotes of the Old Testament], even when no precise allusion can be fixed. The New Testament is, in a sense, latent in the language of the Old. ... It will be clear that, in order to understand the enigmatic words which, in the Synoptic Gospels, are interposed between the parable of the Sower and its interpretation, we must hear sounding through them as an overtone both the voice of the prophet Isaiah and the familiar voice of the Psalmist inveighing against graven images. We cannot do otherwise than to read them as alluding to idolatry.” (And I note that Paul makes frequent multi-dimensional connections to idolatry, for example, in Romans and 1 Corinthians.)

Jesus' parables have a natural feel about them, not just in content, but in their very nature. The kingdom is a generous, giving, growing thing that is alive because its king is the author of life. This king wants the world to be set right, but his way of doing that is very counter-intuitive to our darkened imaginations: he comes as a servant, as the loser of the Darwinian struggle and the one who is emptied of all life. Yet this is the seed, buried, from which life will come. These parables are as powerful as sunlight:

p.174 "[In the parables about the kingdom:] Our deep-rooted feeling for the goodness of justice and equity has to be outraged, because we are being beckoned towards a position directly opposite to the usual one; because we are invited to see the earth, for a moment at all events, rather as it must look from the sun; to experience the world of man as the object of a huge, positive outpouring of love, in the flood of whose radiance such trifles as merit and recompense are mere irrelevancies.”

When our incomplete theologies actually line up with the kingdom proclaimed in these parables, then they reflect a counter-intuitive but blazing light, communicated through the images and words that we summarize as the Trinity:

p.165-166 “In the Christian doctrine of the Trinity the Logos, or Word, is one of three Persons. The conception of a threefold nature in the Godhead is not, however, peculiar to Christianity. It is to be found also in oriental religions and is perhaps the formal principle underlying the whole complicated organism of Greek mythology. It is the depth of all theology. What is peculiar to Christianity is the nexus which that acknowledges between the Second Person of the Trinity and a certain historical event in time. For the Christian, accordingly, religion can never be simply the direct relation between his individual soul and the eternal Trinity. As long as we ourselves are occupying a standpoint in time, so long, interposed between the First and Third Persons, all history, in a manner, lies.”

“Not to realize to the uttermost the otherness of God from ourselves is to deny the Father. But equally, not to strive to realize the sameness – to renege from the Supreme Identity – is to deny the Holy Spirit.”

Barfield slowly came to Christianity because he found in the incarnate God the timeless living in time, the original paradox that is the unimaginable inspiration to the imagination. To Barfield, this fit deeply, down to the nature of thought and language itself, as the Word of God spoken into history.

Christians are called to put things together like Jesus put things together: old and new Testaments, Greek and Hebrew thought, nature and revelation. We are called to live lives of poetry and participation. The rest of this series is Barfield's ideas about how precisely we are to do that, in the light of his focus on mind, word, and language.

[Forward to Part 6]

Responding to Barfield, Part 4: Israel, Idolatry, and Time

[Back to Part 3.5]

Barfield next turns his attention to the ancient civilization that struggled most with idolatry, the one that had injunctions against it in their 10 basic laws and yet had a long history of worshipping images and importing statues of foreign gods into the very temple of the un-imaged God: Israel. From Abraham to Elijah, iconoclasts are an essential part of Israel’s history, and in his own campaign against idols, Barfield spends some time talking about the foundation the literature of Israel provides to his own intellectual enterprise. The story of Israel helps to clearly define the “idols” in the subtitle of the book (and brings to mind Asher Lev’s In the Beginning, with its emphasis on Abraham’s smashing of the idols):

p.110-111 “[I]dolatry may be defined as the valuing of images or representations in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons; and an idol, as an image so valued. More particularly, idolatry is the effective tendency to abstract the sense-content from the whole representation and seek that for its own sake, transmuting the admired image into a desired object. … Striking, as the Jews did, not only at the practice of idolatry, but at the whole religion of the Gentiles centred round it, their impulse was to destroy, not merely that which participation may become, but participation itself. … The idols, the Psalmist insisted, were not filled with anything. They were mere hollow pretences of life. They had no ‘within’.”

We still need this message of anti-idolatry, especially in this deist age of mechanisms within mechanisms:

p.160-161 “What the Psalmist wrote of the old idols is true no less of the idols of the twentieth century. ‘They that make them are like unto them.’ The soul is in a manner all things, and the idols we create are built into the souls of our children; who learn more and more to think of themselves as objects among objects; who grow hollower and hollower.”

Israel’s relationship with YHWH is intense but unmediated by images or idols. Barfield strikes a note here that I don’t agree with, that natural theology is utterly absent from the Old Testament, although it is interesting to think about how much natural theology is in the statements of Jesus as opposed to the Old Testament. We probably have a disagreement of emphasis rather than kind:

p.108 “If, moreover, we review the Old Testament as a whole, we shall scarcely find there suggested what we find assumed by both Aristotle and Aquinas, namely, that knowledge of God’s creation can become knowledge of God. In the Old Testament the relation of man to God is the only thing that is of any importance at all, but it has nothing to do with detailed knowledge – unless by that we mean a knowledge of the moral law.”

It's clear that striking differences can be drawn between this Jewish thought and the thought of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and friends. Barfield distills the differences down to the Greeks thinking in terms of space but the Jews thinking in terms of time:

p.150 “But I think it is true to say that, just as by looking back through the Greek mind, we bring to life the apprehension of form in space as an image or representation, so, by looking back through the Jewish mind, we bring to life an apprehension of form in time – that is, of events themselves, as images, whether of the past or future, or of a state of mind.”

“The second is a far more difficult achievement for us than the first. But I believe anyone who would well consider the way of experiencing Old Testament history, which is implied in the Psalms and in the Jewish liturgy, and then again in Christian art before the Reformation, would understand what I mean. To immerse oneself in the medieval Mystery plays and in those sequences and parallels between Old and New Testament, which are the very backbone, the essential formal principle of the Cathedral sculpture, is to feel that, in one most real sense, the Old Testament was lost with the Reformation.”

“For non-participating consciousness it is either, or. A narrative is either a historical record, or a symbolical representation. It cannot be both; and the pre-figurings of the New Testament in the Old, and the whole prophetic element in the Old Testament is now apt to be regarded as moonshine.”

But of course, Barfield rejects this either/or thinking and embraces the narrative as both. The people of Israel thought in terms of a grand narrative story that ran through time, and saw all the previous events of their peculiar history as pointing forward to fulfillment in a king to come, and times of suffering, and the return of God to the mountain of Zion. To talk about how it all came together, however, we have to return to Barfield's favorite subject: the nature of language and of the word itself.

[Forward to Part 5]

Book Review: mr.g

There need to be more books like this, books that are hard to find in Barnes and Noble because you don't know for sure which subject they're under (in this case, science or religion). Alan Lightman is a physicist who has written basically a work of natural theology for the scientific deist. The science of the creation of the universe is nicely presented (with the expected focus on physics to the exclusion of chemistry!), but the second half of the book is almost purely theological. Lightman's god (the mr.g of the title) makes the universe and has ultimate power but not ultimate knowledge.

The joy of reading Lightman for me is that he shows what you can do when you take theology seriously, even if you don't think it all comes together in Christianity. I see this as a partial illustration of what Paul in Romans calls God's "invisible attributes" which are obvious through Creation -- but only partial, because I think if no one could actually think mr.g exists, he just doesn't add up because he is not thoroughly good. Now, mr.g is essentially a good guy but he can be kind of bumbling. Actually, the evil character Belhor who shows up necessarily after creation is much more interesting than mr.g and his screechy aunt and doughy uncle. Belhor starts with a description of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem and is wonderfully subtle (which I use in the old sense from KJV Genesis). There's a fascinating resemblance to the beginning of Job as well.

One of the reasons why I like this book so much is probably an unintended effect: to me, mr.g is very frustrating in his non-intervention, and he is not really that good when you think about it, and he really is not that generous, not that father-like, more ... uncle-like. Christian theology knows a much more interesting and worship-able God, in my humble opinion. But that's a debate for after this book is read and its theology digested. The presuppositions of deism are rife, but I'd like more deist/agnostic authors to write like this. Then we could get somewhere.

Reponding to Barfield, Part 3.5: A Poetic Interlude

[Back to Part 3]

This is about the halfway point for the Barfield series, and at this point in the book he includes a poem that summarizes his philosophy. I liked the poem and so I think it's appropriate to post it here as a summary looking back and looking forward.



REFLECTION by George Rostrevor Hamilton (1952)
When hill, tree, cloud, those shadowy forms
Ascending heaven are seen,
Their mindless beauty I from far
Admire, a gulf between;

Yet in the untroubled river when
Their true ideas I find,
That river, joined in trance with me,
Becomes my second mind.



The river is like Barfield's "participation."


[Forward to Part 4]