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The evolution
of consciousness has gradually transformed awareness of the power of
the divine word. In the ancient world, the advent of Hebraic monotheism,
for example, changed radically understanding of the relation of the self
to God. For He [Yahweh] had now only one name--I AM--and that was participated by every being who had eyes that saw and ears that heard and who spoke through his throat. But it was incommunicable, because its participation by the particular self which is this moment uttering it was an inseparable part of its meaning. Everyone can call his idol "God," and many do; but no being who speaks through his throat can call a wholly other and outer Being "I."
A waxing experience of the inwardness of the Divine Name was the proper counter-pole to [Hebraic] loss of participation. . . . By the time Jesus was born the Divine Name had ceased to be spoken by man in the Temple or elsewhere. The Pharisees had made it the name of a Being exclusively objective, remote, inaccessible, infinitely superior to, yet imagined as existentially parallel with man. Thus, the Jews had barely glimpsed, before they again lost sight of, that which is the opposite to man's otherness from the I AM, namely his supreme identity with it. (SA 157)With the coming of Christ, for Barfield "the turning point of time itself. . . , the change-over to [the] directionally creator relation . . . , " the old teaching of the Logos is reborn in the metaphor of "the sowing of the word," which stands for "the coming of God himself into nature and man." The true meaning of the "hard sayings" in the parables which contain these teachings (in Matthew xiii, 34 and 35) must remain inexplicable unless . . . Nobody can truly "receive" such sayings who is without some inkling of all that the word and the Incarnation of the Word stand for in human evolution. . . . An understanding of the essence of it, in a different, older perspective--that is, in Greek and Hebrew versions of a "Logos" teaching--had already become possible . . . before Christ came to the earth. To this understanding he appealed in the hard sayings.Christianity has not entirely lost the meaning of the "teaching of the Creative Word." Indeed, Barfield recognizes, 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 now come near to doing so. (SA 125)1"There will be a revival of Christianity," he predicts, "when it becomes impossible to write a popular manual of science without referring to the incarnation of the Word" (SA 164). |