Book Review: That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis

This book is unwieldy and frustrating at times and challenging and troubling and ultimately wondrous. I don't think it quite comes together. How can it bridge Arthurian legend with modern academic politics and a critique of technocracy, medieval god-planet-angels, gender psychology, and the Tower of Babel? But I like books that burst at the seams and that I want to argue with, so, yeah, I really liked this book. The Fisher King's advice on marriage is not complete ... but I'll maintain that it's not entirely wrong either. I took the whole book too seriously in the past, but this time I took it as satire, which made the academic committee meetings funny and horrifying, as funny in this vein as Jane Smiley's Moo. But how can you help but take a story this dark seriously? What's particularly thrilling is to see the ideas of the other Inklings in the mix: Barfield is name-dropped specifically, Tolkien's Numenor is part of the story, and the whole things has that awkward not-quite-real mystical quality of Williams. It doesn't quite work but it's a glorious, provocative mess. It's five-star parts mixed with three-star parts, so I end up giving it four.

Book Review: What Coleridge Thought by Owen Barfield

This may be the best of Barfield's books, or at least the most grounded and therefore far-reaching, but I really think that unless you're a Coleridge scholar, you're better off reading up to it with Barfield's previous works. In particular, Saving the Appearances seems to be a pre-requisite, and I've always thought it was hard to jump into that book without reading Poetic Diction first. The other works by Barfield are OK but I'd say these three are the most worthwhile, in this order.

The other examples of "late Barfield" I've read were too much influenced by Steiner and anthroposophy, but this one manages to avoid those topics (except for a few mentions). Also, Barfield is not focusing on Barfield's ideas so much as Coleridge's, filtered through Barfield, to be sure. I got the sense that the two are enough on the same wavelength that Barfield's filter is more a good teacher teaching than it is a partisan lobbying. I feel like I "get" Coleridge more after this book and that strengthens my estimation of both Coleridge and Barfield. This also fits with the picture of Coleridge from the wonderful history Age of Wonder.

To be sure, Barfield can't get through a whole book without making some annoying absolute and contrarian statements about modern science. I do think that my reading of Barfield can accommodate most of his intellectual puckishness by interpreting Barfield's "matter before mind didn't exist" to become "matter before mind didn't MATTER" (not in the same way as it matters now). It all comes down to what you mean by "exist," see?

But in this book that move of "translation" doesn't have to be made that often. It makes sense that Coleridge and Barfield are sympatico given the influence of German philosophy on Coleridge, which goes right along with Barfield's love for Goethe (which I'm OK with) and Steiner (which I'm not).

In the end, I think Coleridge's "polar logic" as described by Barfield may offer a way to interpret Barfield's philosophy in a way that throws light on modern experience without throwing out all of modern natural history. In fact, polar logic may be incorporated into a narrative interpretation of natural history. Barfield's own statements about the natural fit between evolution and Christianity imply that this should be possible, even when his sweeping dismissal of science of the past seems to get in the way.

Overall, a fascinating and helpful book that I'm working on integrating, but not for the faint of heart. I'm not sure how that interprets into a star rating, but Barfield's against quantitation anyway, so I'm sure he won't mind my avoiding the five stars on this one, even though I think it may be stronger on the whole than previous works I've given five stars to. This is definitely worth working your way up to.

Book Review: The Silver Trumpet by Owen Barfield

This was a fine read-aloud with the kids, but like Owen Barfield's later philosophy, it's entirely quirkly. Oddly paced and with some anachronistic characterizations that remind you that it's almost a century old now, it nonetheless has a bit of charm, novel characters that are both stock and not at the same time, and enough timeless fairy-tale detail to draw you in. It's fun to note the frequent references to dancing if you know that Barfield was part of a dance troupe, of all things. The story hints at depth but I don't think there's that much there. There's also a few shocking deaths partway through the story, which might disturb some children, but I thought it added a bit of heft to the feeling, and some of it is made right in the end. I'm not sure what to think of this, but it surprised me and kept me interested in a unique way -- much like Barfield's philosophy. Hard to find but worth waiting for from library loan.

Book Review: Darwin's Pious Idea by Conor Cunningham

This book breaks down apparent divides: between organism and environment, between mind and matter, and (most obviously from the title) between Darwin and God. It's even published by a prominent evangelical publisher, although from the title itself you can see that it's intended to challenge evangelicals, so there's an attempt to break down a wall there as well.

The best two chapters are easily those on the concept of progress in evolution and how early church fathers like Irenaeus would have had no problem with evolution. For some reason that latter chapter is placed last, which makes for a nice climax but you have to wade through too much to get to it. Other long chapters include attacks on evolutionary psychology and eugenics, which seem out of place -- I can't imagine anyone is actually defending those and knocking them down doesn't do much to show that evolution is somehow "pious." I would prefer that those chapters be shunted to another book and this one focus on the positive parts of bringing evolution and faith together.

Cunningham gets big points in my book for referencing both Conway Morris and RJP Williams (if he had referenced Eric Chaisson, that'd be the trifecta). He touches on tricky topics like panpsychism and veers close to hand-waving, but sitting back now I think he struck a helpful tone overall. Still, the topic seems a little half-baked, although I can't help but think of Owen Barfield when I read it. I myself am lurching back and forth and don't want to go there now.

So this is a long, sprawling book with a very good aim, but with me, Cunningham's preaching to the choir. I'd like to know if this book could convince a hostile audience, whether one of the ultra-Darwinists or the creationists of the subtitle. I found lots of good ideas that go along with my in-progress manuscript ... and maybe my next one as well.

Book Review: Infinity and Perspective by Karsten Harries

Reading this book I kept thinking of Owen Barfield.  Like Barfield, Karsten Harries combines history, science, philosophy, and theology into a coherent whole. Like Barfield, Harries is critical of modernism and postmodernism. But unlike Barfield, Harries finds a place for technology and even modern objectivity, and in my opinion more clearly points to what it might mean to "put things back together." Not only does this book remind me of Owen Barfield, I think in some ways it's actually better than Barfield. It's a challenging but rewarding read, like a steep Alpine trail (another metaphor used in the book itself for the process of knowing).

Harries starts with the theological/scientific speculations of Nicholas of Cusa, showing how a theology of the infinity of God led to the hypothesis of the infinity of the universe. (Bruno gets his own showing showing how derivative his ideas were from his predecessors like Nicholas ... and Harries depicts Bruno as a general irresponsible hack of an academic, not exactly the same picture as the 20-minute cartoon hagiography of Bruno on Cosmos). It was theology that inexorably led to a view of the universe that knocked down the old Aristotelian understanding. The theological speculations of the nominalists paving the way for Descartes, Copernicus, and Galileo. (Similar again to the 20th-century story told in Naming Infinity.)

Barfield's problem is that he stays in the middle ages. In his book Saving the Appearances, Barfield (if I recall correctly) attributes the preface to Copernicus's book to Copernicus himself, and takes the theme that all science is doing is "saving the appearances" as the theme of his book, drawing a line back to Copernicus for validation. This always bothered me. I like some of what Barfield does with this but it has always seemed too extreme. Harries points out that the preface was written by Osiander, not Copernicus, as a sort of fig leaf or olive branch, and Copernicus himself wrote as if the scientific observations were reality, not just appearances, like I assume a scientist would (as did Descartes, as did Galileo). Harries finds the right balance between expressing the incompleteness of our knowledge (the ways in which hypotheses indeed only "save the appearances") but also noting that some hypotheses are better than others, a distinction I don't remember finding in Barfield.

At the end of the book, Harries argues that modern objectivity allows us to step outside our own perspectives and worlds for a bit, but that if continued this motion will lead to nihilism (this sounds almost exactly like Walker Percy in Lost in the Cosmos). Harries instead proposes that we return to earth as our special, unique home -- something I've found that my own writing has tried to do. Harries calls this a "postpostmodern geocentrism" and a new Copernican revolution or recentering of the universe. What Barfield calls "putting things together," Harries identifies as a homecoming. In the end, the story of the history of theology and science is that, after a long journey, the prodigal returns.

Book Review: Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks

I should have listened to that voice in my head (maybe it was a hallucination) and started with Uncle Tungsten as my first book by Oliver Sacks, but chose Hallucinations because it just came out and I got it quickly from the library. My only previous exposure to Sacks was indirect, by watching the movie Awakenings when it came out I-don't-want-to-think-about-how-long ago. From frequent reference, I know he's a good writer, and I can see his technical skills and breadth of experience on display here. This is just so much not the book I should have started with. Color me nonplussed.

Hallucinations left me (mostly) flat because, despite its rigid organization into different chapters being types of hallucinations, it feels disorganized or perhaps overorganized, more often than not consisting of a list of well-described hallucinations with a little bit about the proximate medical or neurological cause. The writing is smooth and the scenes are set expertly, so I have a very clear understanding of what hallucinations must be like. That's something. Hallucinations themselves are so vivid that even so, it is an engaging book, but like hallucinations, there is no coherent narrative.

A few exceptions to this rule exist, especially when Sacks talks abut why he started to write in the manner he is famous for today, and a few other personal anecdotes. I wonder if the book would have worked better as a chronological memoir rather than a topical list.

But what really surprises me is how little Sacks puts these brain-images together to tell us anything about how the brain really works. It seems to me that many hallucinations have a "normal brain function" equivalent, such as how when you're in the lab running HPLC profiles all day, you walk home and the mountains look like HPLC profiles a bit (that might be just me but any repetitive perception seems to give an inertia to the brain, like still feeling the rocking of waves after leaving the ocean). Now, that's voluntary and imaginary, but it looks like the brain is doing the same thing when it hallucinates some types, just against your will (or knowledge). The same for how dreams reflect something of your recent (or distant) experience. So hallucinations tell us something important about perception itself, I'm sure of it. But I couldn't find anything about that (the philosophy of hallucinations?) in this book. The only reference to Wittgenstein is a throwaway more about his brother than him.

At least Sacks doesn't go directly at religion, although there's a whole separate book to be written here by a Barfieldian Christian who takes the vast variety and convincing, quasi-mystical nature of hallucinations seriously but also sees it as, possibly, part of a created order of perception as well. But instead we get the old story about how Joan of Arc may have been epileptic (yes, and ... ? Where in the rules does it say God can't use epilepsy?) and a tacked-on semi-patronizing paragraph about how this tells us nothing either way about the divine.

Sacks is clearly a gifted writer; this just was not the book for me to start on. I've got another Sacks book on hold and I also own Uncle Tungsten from a library sale, and you can't go wrong with an ode to how cool the periodic table is, so I'll give him more chances. I should've started with that last one, I know it ...

The Mechanical Philologist

I'm surprised it took this long.

Finally, the principles of bioinformatics have been applied to philology (the study of/love of words). The software used to make gene trees can be applied to word trees. Here's a news article on it and here is the original Proceedings of the NAS article.

This makes perfect sense because both words and genes are "made of letters." Words are like genes, and genes are like words. There is a deep poetry at the heart of life. Computers are good at analyzing genes, so (with the help of an ear or two) they should also be good at analyzing words.

Once again my mind turns to the anti-mechanism philologist, Owen Barfield. What would he say to this? Would he welcome this pattern-finding algorithm? Or would he insist that, rather than gathering a little more hidden info, this overlooks the most important part of words, the inner revelation and subjective experience?

Not being able to ask him right now, I can only look at the results with a Barfieldian eye, asking, how does the development of genes parallel the development of words? I think he'd at least welcome the idea that there are significant parallels between the two evolutions, and here's a program that may be able to capture them.

From Owen Barfield to Wes Anderson

At the end of the Responding to Barfield series (see sidebar), I felt left with the question, what does it look like to "put things back together"? Some hints of that have been found in other books by Barfield, and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings may be the best example of it, but I want more. I want examples, diagrams, panoramas. This excellent essay by Michael Chabon shows how the films of Wes Anderson may show us something about that. The best example of this, and Anderson's best film, is Moonrise Kingdom. Now I need to go back and watch those other films again ...

Book Review: History in English Words

I wish I had read this book earlier. Throughout all my reading of Owen Barfield, I wanted to know more about the philology that shaped his thoughts. I got a taste of that in Poetic Diction, but that was more about how poets use words than the words themselves. He always asserted that we could trace history through words but I only got glimpses of exactly how. History in English Words, then, shows how. It is a story of how words have changed, sometimes even flipping their meanings, and Barfield has an idea or two as to why they changed in that way.

Like most of Barfield, it has its pedantic or frustratingly obtuse moments but is at least five-sixths brilliant. This may be the best book to start on for someone looking to get into his work (perhaps this is for the historians, while Poetic Diction is for the poets?). There's one chapter in which he goes on about the stifling early church authorities in a manner that shows why C.S. Lewis and Barfield had their tiffs. Lewis would never take the Gnostic gospels as seriously as Barfield. Then there's the last chapter which sounds almost exactly like Tolkien's famous Fairy Stories writings at points. Tolkien fans, make sure to stick around for that last chapter.

If nothing else, this shows what you can do with an Oxford English Dictionary and a passion for words. Now that we have the technology to test some of these assertions about how, when, and why words changed to a degree unthinkable in Barfield's time, I think this little book could provide several theses's worth of hypotheses that Google lit searches could illuminate. I would like to see where Barfield's wrong, mostly because I have a hunch that more often than not he's right, and if so, then he's onto something. I'd like to trust but verify, and this book is about the original data Barfield's working from, so this has inside it a way to reproduce his assertions. Do words really internalize over time, swtiching from us being worked upon to us doing the working? Are Roman words really as external/concrete as Greek words are internal/abstract? What kind of shifts in meaning did the Septuagint's translation of Hebrew scriptures into Greek force upon the Second-Temple thought and theology? So many questions, so little time.

The limiting reagent for me is the time. And the knowledge. And the background. And ... let's stop there before I delete this post in despair.

At any rate, this book will let you see depths and layers of meaning in most every word you see (and choose to use). If sitting in a Philology class taught by Barfield sounds like a good idea to you, don't wait for the MOOC. Read the book.

Book Review: Worlds Apart

The Owen Barfield reading tour continues with Worlds Apart, written by Barfield as a "dialogue" between several academics with different philosophies. Two are clearly anthroposophists like Barfield, and the rest represent different disciplines ranging from physics to psychology. I'm trying to decide if this book is a good entry point to Barfield or not. It does focus on science and the back-and-forth of the many objections to Barfield's ideas. The dialogue format of Worlds Apart plays to Barfield's experience as a lawyer, and about 1/3 of the way through there's an extended Socratic dialogue that may be the best entry to his philosophy that I've seen. The problems include a section of extended Steiner-worship at the end and a definite feeling that the other characters are straw men.

What I'd really like to see is an extended dialogue between Barfield and C.S. Lewis, which I know actually happened because Lewis alluded to it in his famous description of Barfield as his "second friend." There's a book of Barfield commenting on Lewis, and that may be the next stop on the tour.

One of my constant questions would be what Barfield would make of the analysis of DNA words that I'm thinking about right now to reconstruct the ancient words. On the one hand, that's exactly what he did with English words, and he argues at the end of Saving the Appearances that evolution and Christianity naturally cohere. On the other hand, English words are a way of looking at the human mind, while DNA words are not, because these words were never formed by the human mind, and there's also that little bit about Barfield saying the past "never happened." But this passage near the end of Worlds Apart finally resolves it for me:

"Brain, heart, liver, spleen have been built into your body by the world, by the whole history of the world, and if you 'study' one of them in that intensive way, you have access to the relevant period of world-history. Access, first of all, to the building that was going on before your birth and, through that, back into their remoter phylogenesis."

"You see -- or at any rate I have argued -- that if evolution has indeed been fundamentally the evolution of self-consciousness, there cannot be that sharp break between ontogenetic and phylogenetic development, which the positivist picture of evolution assumes. The one must merge gradually back into the other." (p. 195-196)

Of course, right after this high point is when the book really goes off the deep end, with too much Steiner and too little anyone else. (Maybe even too little Barfield!) However, that part is written as a collection of unconnected observations, almost like appendices, and so I think even Barfield saw some of that as outside the necessary argument he was making. I'm starting to separate the wheat from the chaff here and I think there's a way to adapt some of the ideas of Barfield in a way that takes the good and leaves the bad. In particular, I think Tolkien ultimately did that and such an adaptation accounts for some of the strength of The Lord of the Rings. Is there a way to do that with the data collected by current biology rather than the ancient Norse sagas? I'm not sure. Stay tuned.

The Testimony of Owen Barfield

In general, all three books I've read by Owen Barfield (whether "real" books or collections of essays) become more "Christian" as they go along. That description would certainly apply to "Philology and the Incarnation" in The Rediscovery of Meaning. If you have time, go read the whole thing here. It is Barfield's "Why I Am a Christian" essay: why a lawyer raised an agnostic, and following his reasoning about evolution (the evolution of consciousness, but still!) would end up believing through reason that the lynchpin of history is Jesus.

The key to Barfield's conversion (if such a gradual process can be called a conversion, really) is his observation of a "reversal in direction of man's relation to his environment" over the course of history. Specifically, he noted this change must have taken place somewhere between Alexander the Great and St. Augustine (two personalities that exemplify the change). More specifically, the change involved the way the word "logos" was used, by Greeks and Jews somewhere around Alexandria, sometime around 1st century BC (definitely, he's thinking of Philo here). He notes that this change took place right after the Stoics* first used words like 'objective' and 'subjective' the same way we do, the first time the self was really defined. Then he found in Jesus the kind of words that would change history in that way -- "the words of life" as Peter put it.

In the introduction to The Rediscovery of Meaning, he put is this way: "Here is the antecedent Unity of unities, here is the interior Transforming Agent of evolution, here is the positive meaning of life on earth, here is the meaning of Meaning itself staring me in the face!"

A million Christians have a million stories of why they are Christians. I find this one oddly comforting, and thought it should be repeated. Can I get an amen?



* = I thought of how NT Wright describes Paul's Mars Hill speech in Acts 18 as an acceptance and confrontation of Stoic and Epicurean doctrine, and now I want to go back and read it with "Barfield glasses" on. For one thing, Paul's quotation of and affirmation of the Greek statement "we are his children" would be right along with Barfield. There's an interesting project there, in how the words of Jesus through Paul are interacting with the words of the Stoics. And Paul's deliberate, even off-putting insistence on bringing it all together by pointing out the impending Judgment Day (something we'd culturally avoid these days) is perhaps a model of the confrontation of Stoic philosophy with the idea of resurrection. Is that the verbal impetus that steered the trajectory of thought?

Book Review: The Rediscovery of Meaning, And Other Essays by Owen Barfield

When I first find a new author that really excites me, I usually have a moment of Fall, in which I realize that this new author isn't really "all that." It's my first substantial disagreement with him or her. Maybe with Marilynne Robinson it was a few political comments in her recent book (reviewed above). With J.R.R. Tolkien for most readers it happens about 1/4 of the way through the Silmarillion -- maybe not disagreement, but just not getting it. For Neil Gaiman with C.S. Lewis it was probably the incident of Susan at the door in The Last Battle. Let it be known that I personally think the first of these three examples is the corrent reaction and the other two are misguided (then again, I would, wouldn't I?). Still, there's a moment of disenchantment that follows enchantment, and I knew it was coming with Owen Barfield, kind of like you know that there will be a big fight coming at some point after you get married. The only question is how soon.

As you can guess, I encountered that moment with Owen Barfield and it did take me three books to get there. If Barfield and I have to fight it would be over Rudolf Steiner. ("Rudolf, Rudolf, Rudolf! It's always about RUDOLF with you, isn't it?!") Barfield simply takes too much of his philosophy from this Steiner guy, and the way he talks about him -- not his "writings" but his "findings" no less -- well, I'm kind of glad that I disagree because it gives me a chance to assert my own individuality. There seems to be so much else that Barfield gets right but I am not convinced about Steiner. Which leads to some unconvincing passages about reincarnation as well. (But I've got to remind myself, as much as I disagree, I'm disagreeing with Plato as well, and I do believe the self can survive death -- I'm just a one-time-only kind of guy for many reasons, including sheer economy.)

The bottom line is, it's nice to know I'm not just blindly a Barfield disciple now, and really, the 90% of this book that I don't have a bone to pick with is excellent. I have a few forthcoming blog posts inspired by different topics, which should show that I still find his writing vividly inspirational, and I do feel like the parts of Barfield's philosohy I do want to retain are much stronger now. Looking forward to keeping on reading, even about Steiner, maybe there's something worthwhile there but I'm currently skeptical.

Lest anybody think I'm taking this in uncritcally, I'm not. Definitely, if you're reading Barfield, start elsewhere (or maybe just with the first essay, which gives its title to the collection and justly so, because it is a nice capsule of Barfieldisms). There's a rough dividing line around 1970, in which the stuff published earlier is 95% good and the stuff published later is about 66% good, so maybe it can be chalked up to the attention given him after he retired from law and the increased rate of publication. Still, 66% good is pretty good. I dream of 66% ...

Owen Barfield on Design

I've been trying to put my finger on why books like The Grand Design by Steven Hawking seem to be talking past many theists like myself. Hawking goes to great lengths to pin the origin of the universe on M-theory and some sort of fluctuations at the quantum level, so that so "trigger" or external agent is required for the beginning of it all:

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.^"

And my reaction is, "So what? It still began." Whether it began externally or internally seems beside the question, at least at the level of mechanism. In other words, if God set it up that a fertile field of nothingness (or false vacuum) according to the rules of M-theory and it underwent a fluctuation producing light, and such a mechanism meant "Let there be light," then I don't have a problem with that. It's kind of cool, actually. Hawking is objecting to an external mechanism as opposed to an internal one, and I don't have a problem with either, for this event at least.

Then I was reading Owen Barfield (there I go again) in an essay titled "Science and Quality" and see this:

"What is important is to distinguish the two principles [of mechanism and organism], not to condemn one and exalt the other. What is important is to distinguish two active principles -- of free life and confining form -- while perceiving their interpenetration at all points. And if we do so we find, once more, that the ultimate distinction lies between 'inward' and 'outward.' Coleridge, as usual, formulated acutely when he defined as follows: 'Whatever is organized from without, is a product of mechanism; whatever is mechanized from within, is a product of organization.' It would be along these lines, I think, that one would reply to those who mistakenly identify organicism, or holism, with the so-called argument from design and reject it for that reason; since 'design' is essentially a pattern imposed from without rather than emerging from within. And as such it is applicable to the products of mechanism rather than to products of organization."

The Big Bang as a pattern emerging from within seems just as wondrous, if not more so, than a pattern imposed from without. And both seem designed in the way that's important. So the main argument of The Grand Design, in my opinion, misses the point. Would Hawking ever read Barfield?

Owen Barfield: Man and Meaning Video

This is a video made by another reader of Barfield with some footage of Owen himself, some back story, and a few quotes. This is a good place to start when reading Barfield.

Owen Barfield: Man and Meaning from David Lavery on Vimeo.

[Proceed to the Introduction to the "Responding to Barfield" series]

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]

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]