Lawrence
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The mystery of the incarnation--of how the divine
becomes flesh, the spirit body, the metaphysical physical--is, of course,
of great interest to Barfield.
If we "dwell on the full meaning of the word
incarnation," the Meggid explains in Unancestral
Voice, we will understand that "it does not refer only to human flesh,
or even only to flesh. It refers to the whole world of nature, in so far
as it is perceived through the senses; and it was to this world of the
senses that Gabriel directed the earnest gaze
of mankind" (40).
According to the
Anthroposophical
concept of the descent of the potency, there is no reason to believe that
reincarnation of the human spirit takes place all at once. It is, rather,
the product of the
evolution of consciousness,
as Burgeon comes to understand in Unancestral Voice:
He saw quite clearly that mysterious
potency
on its way down from the head to the lower organism. He saw it reach the
heart and the blood and from there begin to manifest itself in a new way,
a way in which the Greek world has as yet no experience-and of which [D.
H.] Lawrence and most of the twentieth century no longer had any experience.
He saw it radiating outward from within, as it once rayed formatively inward
from without--then, when it was hardly yet aware of itself as physical.
He saw the beginning of that awareness taking shape already in the Middle
Ages. (29)
And in "The Philosophy of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge," Barfield offers a brief glimpse of what incarnation's
final stage might imply:
Thus at the final stage of the process of
evolution and bringing it full circle, we wake to see the whole as an expression
of the original polarity. We see realized
as fact that polarity which, as dialectic, was found to constitute the
nature of grammar and logic--the I AM in the act of reproducing itself.
That which I AM has so long and laboriously created itself affirms "I am."
The
Son of God awakens on earth and, awakened, names himself the Son
of Man. (RCA 161)
See in particular,
Romanticism Comes of
Age, passim, Unancestral Voice,
passim. |
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